Sun acaba de anunciar su Project Blackbox, un prototipo de centro de datos virtualizado incluido en un contenedor, apilable y modular, y optimizado para consumir poca energía, refrigerarse de modo eficiente, ocupar poco espacio y proporcionar una elevada eficiencia de proceso. Un superordendor “portátil” y cuasi-autónomo utilizable en situaciones extremas o, al menos, no estándar. Como innovación tecnológica supone un cambio cuantitativo, en capacidad, eficiencia y autonomía:
Project Blackbox started with Sun's CTO Greg Papadopoulos and Danny Hillis, a member of Sun's Technical Advisory Board and cofounder of Applied Minds, Inc.
"When everyone was racing to build the smallest rackmount servers, we asked a contrarian question: 'What is the biggest computer we could build?' We realized the answer had better not be bigger than a shipping container if we wanted to transport it easily," Papadopoulos explained. "This turned into Project Blackbox, which includes unique design features to optimize efficiency and performance. Five patents are currently pending on the general system and installed rack designs, various aspects of the highly efficient cooling systems, and the environmental monitoring system. We are very exicted about it."
Entre las ventajas de esta “caja negra” se encuentran:
- A Complete Datacenter Designed for Rapid Deployment: Customers will be able to easily acquire and deploy a complete, "instant-on" modular datacenter in one tenth the time it takes to build a traditional datacenter, deploying in a matter of weeks versus years. Once ordered, Project Blackbox will be configured, transported, and rapidly deployed, and the virtualized datacenter will simply work in the box.
- Unmatched Datacenter Flexibility: Customers will be able to deploy new datacenters and increase capacity as needed, consolidate systems on the fly, and capitalize on low-cost electricity, real estate, and talent around the world without sacrificing performance or requiring special facilities.
- Breakthrough Economics: Project Blackbox will deliver unmatched cost savings and efficiencies. Based on Sun's calculations, Project Blackbox will cost 1/100th of the initial cost of a traditional 10,000-square-foot datacenter, and one fifth the cost per square foot, as well as be 20 percent more efficient. Project Blackbox will also require about one third of the space of a conventional deployment with equivalent compute power. Savings are gained by speeding deployment cycles; leveraging standard components; optimizing performance, power, and cooling; and enabling customers to place datacenters in the most cost-effective locations for their businesses.
Pero estas innovaciones “cuantitativas” se traducen en un cambio cualitativo mucho más radical al abrir la posibilidad de uso en nuevos escenarios. Estos son algunos posibles escenarios imaginados desde Sun para su proyecto:
- A large Web 2.0 company struggling to keep pace with growth could rapidly build a datacenter and place it next to an inexpensive, green energy source.
- A New York firm could place a container in a New Jersey warehouse, on a rooftop, or in a parking garage where space is more abundant or less expensive. This would allow a company to increase datacenter capacity without having to undertake the cost and complexity of building a new class-A facility.
- Global relief organizations could leverage Project Blackbox's easy management and support for up to 10,000 simultaneous desktop users--without administrators--to bring computing to remote villages and quickly mobilize IT systems to support relief efforts.
- Governments worldwide could move data and applications close to field operations and away from terrorists or disasters quickly and confidently by taking advantage of Project Blackbox's powerful, ruggedized design.
- An oil company could bring high-performance computing to offshore oil rigs for on-site seismic modeling in the ocean or onto supertankers to simulate fluid load.
Pero en BLDGBLOG, Geoff Manaugh se hace eco del Project Blackbox e imagina otros usos “más atractivos”:
ideal for pirate utopias …Outdoing Archigram – who once dreamed of air-lifting whole prefab command/control systems into the wild, where, at the push of a button, computerized instant cities and other "plug-inscapes" would take form ...
Como venimos discutiendo, la red puede permitir la creación de espacios ciudadanos libres, desde las formas más primitivas inspiradas en las las zonas temporalmente autónomas de Hakim Bey a los nuevos modelos de sinoismo digital que tratan de convertir en realidad los sionistas digitales. Pero una utopía sólo se hace real cuando pierde algo de su filosofía y aplica un cierto pragmatismo. En este caso, puede que para que la utopía se convierta en realidad precise de una infraestructura física que soporte los espacios virtuales con la mayor autonomía posible. La caja negra de Sun puede ser el hardware de esa solución, aunque aún será dependiente de la obtención de energía. Pero más peligrosa que la dependencia energética puede ser una nueva amenaza: la maquinaria fiscal que está tratando de controlar los mundos virtuales.
