KEY POINTS:
The black shipping container outside Sydney's Imax theatre just before Christmas turned a few heads among the crowds of tourists and restaurant diners on the banks of Darling Harbour.
The 6m-long metal container, emblazoned with Sun Microsystem's logo, was the first Australasian appearance of the IT company's unusual
new product, daubed Project Blackbox.
Sun, a company best known for selling computer servers to businesses and developing the Java programming platform, invented Blackbox after identifying an unfilled niche in the corporate IT market: a need for portable data centres.
Why would a business want to lug its precious data around on servers crammed into a shipping container, rather than safely stowed behind concrete walls in the basement of corporate HQ?
There are several reasons, Sun says. Some of them have to do with the increasing corporate fixation on improving the environmental sustainability of IT.
Businesses' data centres gobble up a massive amount of electricity. In some parts of the world more power is simply not available, so the way to boost data processing capacity is to take the data to where there is alternative, hopefully cheaper, electricity available.
Hauling a boxed-up data centre around in search of cheap power may sound extreme, but the energy supply problem is real enough to have corporates looking at such off-the-wall options.
"There's every probability that in the United States by 2010 we will run out of power to fuel our largest data centres," Kiwi ex-pat technology marketing guru Andy Lark told November's Digital Future Summit in Auckland.
A large chunk of data centre power consumption goes towards cooling the facilities' servers. The Blackbox concept offers some intriguing solutions to cutting air conditioning costs by making the data centre portable. In Japan, for instance, Sun is part of a consortium planning to place 30 Blackboxes 100m underground in a disused coalmine where the constant 15C air temperature will mean a US$9 million a year saving in air-con costs.
Taking the natural-environment-offers-free-cooling scenario to its extreme, a Russian telecommunications company in a hurry to beef up its bill processing capacity has installed a Blackbox in the open air outside its Moscow offices.
Sun says it was rapt with the interest shown in its demo Blackbox. About 900 IT professionals from across New Zealand and Australia turned up to have a look over the two days it spent in Sydney and Canberra. Depending on the exact technology customers ask to have loaded inside, the high-tech containers will cost around $800,000 each.
The global focus on power conservation and IT sustainability presents an opportunity for New Zealand, according to Lark.
"If I was in New Zealand looking at a digital strategy I would absolutely go and look very, very closely at power consumption and how do we build the greenest, most efficient IT infrastructure on earth because that's what will win," he said.
This is a smart suggestion given the Government's push towards carbon neutrality and its drive to sell New Zealand's green credentials on the global stage, combined with our emerging status as a destination country for those seeking IT outsourcing services. The world's corporates are increasingly looking to farm out their IT requirements and if we can stamp a green badge on our particular offering it would open up a significant market.
We need to move quickly, however, because others have their eyes on the same market.
Two IT storage companies, Hitachi Data Systems and Iceland's Data Islandia, last month announced what they called the world's most environmentally friendly outsourced data archiving service, powered by carbon-neutral electricity.
"The principle is a good one," said Ian Brown, a senior analyst at IT research firm Ovum.
"It's easier and more efficient to transmit data over long distances, than it is to transfer electricity. We expect to see many more IT services vendors locating their data centres and facilities, not just off-shore, but close to power utilities, especially where those power utilities use renewable energy resources."
Simon Hendery travelled to Sydney as a guest of Sun Microsystems.