It was not so long ago, that the world's technology press were lauding Sun Microsystems's novel' concept for a containerized mobile data center. However, it appears that Rackable Systems Inc, has beaten its competitor to the commercial door, with the announcement of its first sale of ConcentroÔäó, Rackable Systems' new modular, containerized data center product. Purchased by one of the world's leading Internet companies, Concentro is a self-contained, fully portable data center featuring extreme server and storage density with highly efficient cooling and easy serviceability. Sun expects to enter production of its Blackbox modular data center in 2008, and has hitherto been reluctant to disclose details of customer interest.
"The need to reduce energy consumption and rethink space requirements is changing the look and feel of IT environments," said Giovanni Coglitore, founder and chief technology officer of Rackable Systems. "We applied Rackable Systems' proven experience in cabinet, server and power infrastructure to directly address the needs of space-constrained data centers. The result: an entirely new data center model that maximizes density, efficiency and performance while radically reducing costs of installation and management. Concentro is the perfect building block for the energy efficient, eco-friendly data center of the future."
Like Sun's Blackbox, Concentro is designed to augment or replace traditional data centers of any size, and features compute density levels of up to 9,600 processing cores in a 40' by 8' shipping container.
The first release of Concentro leverages Intel® Xeon® quad-core processors in Rackable Systems' half-depth servers, enabling extremely high density per square foot. Its unique, highly efficient cooling technology enables a reduction in cooling and air handler power costs by up to 80% over traditional data center environments.
The operational challenges associated with extending today's and tomorrow's data centers, as well as the heightened plea for enterprises to reduce their environmental footprint are key factors driving our customers' need for a flexible, cost efficient solution," said Tom Barton, CEO of Rackable Systems. "Rackable Systems is committed to continuing to deliver the most efficient, powerful, cost effective and socially responsible data center solutions on the market."