is in this thing?

The British military, certainly, use iso containers for shipping everything from living quarters to aircon units. Add in the fact that a shipping container can be relatively easily tempested, and bingo, an instant out of area computer centre using fibres to connect dumb terminals with lcd screens, and you have an instant relatively low-profile low-RF-emission data centre. Make it 'off the shelf' for the main processing hub container, and the costs may even come rocketing down.

Sun received a ribbing? Perhaps you should review your own postings before trying to claim the moral highground.....

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/03/26/rackable_concentro/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/04/11/ms_white_trash/

Does the article mean to imply that SUN were the first to offer a data-centre-in-a-container product?

If so, please provide evidence. I have seen a product called DECcontainer in 1988 or 1989 which was a regular DEC product at the time and I would be very surprised if SUN already had such a product at that time. I tend to believe however that IBM, Bull and others had similar products back then.

Oh if only I had a penny for every first product claim in the IT industry, I'd be a rich man. Everybody constantly seems to invent new stuff which has been there already 30, 40 or 50 years earlier. The whole IT industry seems like a bunch of pretenders and history fakers. It's come to a point where one feels ashamed to be working in the industry.

Do you mean HP the leading x86 vendor, leading M$ on x86 vendor, leading Linux on x86 vendor, and actually just leading server vendor full-stop? Oh, and since they overtook IBM last year, HP the biggest IT company in the world? I think HP seem to be doing quite fine with a much larger range of systems and solutions than Dell to the point where the vast majority of customers seem very happy just using standard HP offerings. Should there prove to be enough money in what looks to be a very niche market, then I'm sure HP will soon be number one there too.

And for the umpteenth time, DATACENTERS IN CONTAINERS ARE NOTHING NEW! I can remember HP offering a DR service of systems, storage, LAN and SAN in portacabins out of HP Pinewood near Wokingham since at least the mid-nineties. Ash, you need to stop reading the Sun marketeering brochures and realise there is little they do which is new (especially Project Copy Linux).

They've been shipping digital telephone exchanges in containers since the early 1980s. They're fully air conditioned containers full of racks of electronics. Drop them in and hook them up to fiber etc and voila!

No reason why a data centre couldn't be packed the same way. It's not all that different.

not sure what this article reflects on Dell but it certainly does show Sun in it true light

i.e. so many times the first to market (albeit first in the last decade or so), so many times the innovator, so many times releasing such great technology offerings ... but so rarely managing to make it a great success - why is this? are they so bad at sales and marketing? have they just become the whipping boy in the IT press? do we just not like going with the 'new things' first time around? I have no idea

You mean HP - who were outgrown in Market Share last quarter by this "Box Shifter"?

Gotta love the HP Snobbery on this website sometimes....

Would that be tiny amount of market share? Are we talking Dell x86 here (i.e., real market presence, just not a lot compared to HP) or Sun T1/T2 (i.e., tiny, tiny ickle figures)? Face it, even doubling next to nothing is still just about nothing.

Matty the HP fanboy at work again, after all he needs to do everything to make sure HP shifts it's boxes too. After all HP and DELL have so much in common, both are true box shifters compared with each other on price. Just build boxes in China, wrap some teeny tiny management stuffs and keeps keeps selling boxes. HP has no software story, no middleware - only management software, just enough necessary to keep selling boxes. Matty is now desperate with Sun keeping him busy with the new x86 boxes and T1/T2 - may be he hopes people will flock to HP if he can scare them off Sun - keep it up Matty boy. Great job !