A while back I made some posts on the new Sun Black Box project. Someone commented, asking about my thoughts on the APC trucks that have been around a while. APC beet Sun to the punch as far as mobile, on-demand data centers go. Besides being early to the game, the APC advantage was that their solution was on wheels!
Now, in this Cnet news.com article APC responds to the Sun Black Box. While the "one" InfraStruXure Express on-demand Mobile Data Center is on sale for $1.5 million, APC has said that they are not particularly interested in building more.
It is almost as if the two companies are building them just to see who buys them (and why). I'm still uncertain on Phil Windley's comment that the 'reasons' to use them are to get around latency and net neutrality issues. Once again not once was the topic of Disaster Recover mentioned in the Cnet article! Mobile solutions like the ones from Sun and APC are not and have not been the only solutions around. There are plenty of vendors and perhaps the option to rent is just more attractive than buying a container or truck.
Sungard has a lot on their site about their mobile solutions, but it took a Google image search to find a picture of their truck.
A Forrester report (if only I had $379 burning a hole in my pocket) states that Agility leads the industry in mobile DR solutions. Here is a link to their solutions page.
Disaster Recovery Journal also lists Network Services and Rentsys under the Mobile Data Centers category.
I haven't written off the Black box yet, but am really having a hard time understanding the purpose. I was hoping APC would come back with their mobile solution and keep it going. Although they would obviously corner the power and cooling aspects with their products, at least you would have the option to put what you want in the truck for server hardware.
We'll just have to wait to see what the new year will bring for new solutions and technologies.
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