Blackbox gets a new name and shiny new customers

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Sun’s Project Blackbox — originally announced back in October of 2006 — is going places. For example, it has a new name: “Sun Modular Datacenter (Sun MD)S20.” And a YouTube video.

The one thing it hasn’t had much of publicly announced customers. Counting the Stanford Linear Accelerator installation there was…one.

Now, to be fair, I think we’re probably just on the cusp of a potential change in datacenter dynamics in organizations. It’s going to take a while for datacenter customers to be pushed so far beyond their existing infrastructure that they need to move outside. Because that’s what it will take: no one wants their million dollar tour stop housed outside on a gravel pad in a steel box. Unless the only other choice is in a competitor’s facility.

But the company has made surprisingly little traction with what I thought was a reasonable idea despite visiting “73 cities on 4 continents and [having] been toured by more than 12,000 customers and partners”, according to the press release (link below).

Yesterday they issued a press release announcing 4 other installations: a second one at SLAC, and units at Hansen Transmissions, Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre (UMCN), and Mobile TeleSystems OJSC (MTS).

So, that’s something. If you’re in the market, entry configs start at $559000 US.

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  1. […] Someone must know something about the containerized computing business that’s good. The customer adoption that Rackable and Sun have talked about publicly isn’t exactly broad — four sites that we know of at Sun. […]