Disaster recovery Toolkit

Story: Google patents data centre in a shipping container

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Google and Sun will fight it out...

Just be pinged this comment from the guys at analysts The451:

451 analyst Dan Golding has this to say on the computers in a crate patent scrap:

It's worth remembering that Sun made a big deal out of Project Blackbox, which is Sun's half-hearted swipe at solving datacenter cooling and power issues, while selling servers by the truckload (literally).

It's not that the concept is entirely without merit – a fixed configuration of servers in a shipping container allows airflow to be precisely modeled so as to enhance cooling efficiency. It's just that T1R thinks the entire exercise, while 'cool,' is largely a waste of time because it only addresses a niche market, rather than tackling, head-on, the problems of enterprises and hosting providers. In fact, Google, which sees computing and servers as building blocks of its global infrastructure, is probably one of the few firms that could really leverage the concept well.

So, it now looks like Google and Sun will get to fight it out over a largely worthless bit of intellectual property. T1R, in the interest of fairness, proposes a solution: a few black boxes full of servers for Googlers to use their '20% time' on, and we all call it even? Then, maybe Sun can get back to solving server power problems and Google can fix Google Apps, while the black boxes do what they're best at: getting attention.

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