Japanese Blackbox servers get installed in a coal mine: where the Sun doesn't shine
Martin Levy
Tuesday, November 20th, 2007
T1R has followed the Sun Microsystems Project Blackbox story from the start. We have reported on the first successful install at SLAC: The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. T1R has commented about the pluses and minuses of driving up to a building with a box that requires large amounts of both power and cooling to operate. No one has a spare 100KW or associated cooling just dangling outside in the parking lot. SLAC solved that issue by building a new cooling plant to run at least two Blackbox boxes. That first Project Blackbox was shipped painted white, a better color to use when the units sit outside baking in the California sun.
Now Sun Microsystems and ten other companies in a Japanese consortium, including Internet Initiative Japan (IIJ), have announced 30 Project Blackbox boxes are headed for an underground datacenter just outside Tokyo in a region called Chubu. Chubu's most famous landmark is Mount Fuji and these boxes won't be placed at any of the ten stations that assist climbers to the 12,388-foot summit. Sun's plan is to use a coal mine and locate the servers 330 feet below ground level.
Another story about underground datacenters?
T1R has written about successful underground datacenters, along with various ex-military bunkers converted into datacenters. The successful ones are built into former limestone mines. The military bunkers are normally high on the security story; however, they lack some or all of the features required to make them successful for enterprise hosting. Successful ones, like StrataSpace in Kentucky or the offsite storage run by Iron Mountain in Pennsylvania, are all in former limestone mines. Limestone is solid and strong enough to hold up the ceilings. Limestone can be treated to stop any dust from flaking off the exposed walls. What they have in common with coal mines is a consistent cool temperature all year round. However, that's where the situations diverge and diverge quickly.
Coal dust is just not what you want around your servers or storage
T1R is perplexed. How can you clean up a coal mine to the point of having it ready for the installation of datacenter servers? Even if they're installed inside nearly airtight shipping containers? Even if those containers are set up and tested above ground and then lowered into the coal mine for actual operations? The project talks about using ground water for cooling. Does the cooling subsystem exist on the surface 330 feet above the servers or does it also get built inside the coal mine? What do you do when you have to open the doors to the Blackbox? Why does a sealed container with a liquid cooled subsystem need to be placed inside an underground datacenter when the ambient temperature doesn't really affect the cooling subsystem anyway? What about explosive gases? Too many questions and potentially not enough answers.
A $405m project
The project is quoted as costing $405m and T1R has run the numbers and is doubly perplexed. If you built this above ground, keeping in mind that Project Blackbox's major marketing push is that it's capable of operating while just sitting outside in the parking lot, then you would need around 10,000 square feet of parking space, around 4.5mW of power for the IT load, around 1,800 tons of cooling (assuming N+1 chiller configuration) and not much else. You can actually rack 'n' stack the Blackboxes so even less space is really required.
The problem is that none of that seems to add up to $405m. That number seems way too high and that number has to include the ongoing operational costs along with plenty of application development. It's not the true cost of the datacenter portion.
Does the concept fly?
T1R wrote about the Project Blackbox installation at SLAC. Sun decided to deliver a unit that was painted white; a good choice of color for an outside installation. What will Sun choose for this installation? Even if these get shipped as white boxes, they will end up black pretty quickly. T1R recommends the color chosen for the original 3M Post-it notes: canary yellow.
Source: www.t1r.com |
