Tuesday, January 08, 2008

Floating Data Centers

I really don't know what to think about this whole container model data center thing. It is really intriguing and there have been some creative uses for them. After posting about nuclear-proof bunkers I now read, on the Silverback blog, that a company is planning to put data center containers on ships!

I'm much too confused to write the details here -- and you can check the story out for yourself. I just don't know if I can figure this one out. They list some of the reasons 'why' someone would want to use a container on the ship, but it simply doesn't counter the hundreds of reasons why you wouldn't want to.

The company is IDS (International Data Security), and Ken from the Silverback blog has a couple of posts on the company as well as a brochure for it. It sounds like it is pretty early stage development, yet they have pretty ambitious plans (22 ships in North America, 50 worldwide). No mention of whether it is a generic container or Sun BlackBox, Rackable IceCube, etc.

Check out the two posts here and here

3 comments:

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Unknown said...

I know I'll be signing up for a tour of the first vessel come this April!

Bob Lozano said...

John-
I think this idea simply sidesteps the core issues facing data centers today. While much can be (and is being) done to improve data centers, I think the real long-term solutions require some enablement by the application folks. More here.