The Swimming Data Center

In 2006 we had Project Blackbox from Sun, who have now bought MySQL and are starting to have some really cool servers. Google then patented something like that, a data center in a shipping container. Now we have something new.

Ars Technica posted about a new start-up called International Data Security. They are launching something described in this PDF.

In short: they are buying old container ships and making them into hosting centers. First one goes online in April in San Francisco. They want to deploy 50 ships world-wide. The cool thing is that having so much water around, makes cooling easier, and having an entire ships gasoline tank, makes for 1 month of power outage. Of course the ships are set-up to handle containers, hence blackbox … . Above that there will be offices, food and quarters on the ships.

All sounds to cool indeed. Sadly they can’t move efficiently due to the stupid bandwidth that has to go in there… damn :)