24Sep 07

Taking datacentres on the road

Posted by Angus Kidman @ 17:08 2 comments

Is it a truck? Is it a giant portable wind tunnel? Well, yes -- but it's also a mobile datacentre with a maximum capacity of 4.1 petabytes of storage, which would easily hold an awful lot of high-res Superman footage.

The Ice Cube from Rackable Systems is, essentially, a portable datacentre -- one which you could quickly deploy at a new location, without needing to worry about all the usual hassles of finding real estate where no-one minds the floor being raised. Inside a standard ISO shipping crate you can cram up to 11,200 processing cores, the company claims. The standard design also makes it easy to pop onto a truck or train, which might appeal to, say, mining companies.

The cube uses a self-contained cooling system (basically, it sucks heat out from the systems) which means that walking through it is indeed rather like a wind tunnel. As a result, on a hot summers' day, you might have trouble keeping the office staff away.

The main market for the Ice Cube is rapidly expanding companies who don't want to build or rent dedicated datacentre space. In theory, you could set one of these babies up in the car park outside the office, although you'd need something a bit more substantial than just an extension cord to keep it running and you might want to invest in a security guard.

To demonstrate the possibilities of the Ice Cube, Rackable Systems set one up outside the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, where it attracted a steady stream of visitors who'd heard the word "nanometer" too many times in the preceding days. Check out Snorage's photo tour to see if this is the solution to your datacentre dreams.

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In San Francisco, it's not unusual to see technology advertising on the side of vehicles -- we can't imagine too many other cities would be flooded with taxis proclaiming that Oracle has the "fastest growing middleware", for example. But this isn't actually an ad, it's a datacentre -- the Rackable Ice Cube, complete with its own power supply on a trailer. (The adjacent building wasn't willing to share its power.)

Credit: Angus Kidman/ZDNet Australia

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