Sun Microsystems announced that its Project Blackbox has already started shipping. This time, they meant it, since the blackbox is in fact a mobile datacenter, built inside a big container, similar to those that usually ship smuggled merchandise and Chinese illegal immigrants. The datacenter is delivered at the buyers' headquarters via airplane or boat.

Also known as the Modular Datacenter S20, the mobile unit can cut deployment time to 22 days and diminish the cooling needs by 40 percent tops. This is quite an unusual datacenter and the concept is so interesting that Sun has made it publicly available. The company claims that a Blackbox demo went on a tour through 73 cities worldwide over the past year, and it has been visited on the inside by more than 12,000 people.

The datacenter can provide a maximum of 18 teraflops of performance, with a maximum of 3 petabytes of storage space. All these can be yours for a starting price of $559,000. The Blackbox can be used right away (our of the box would have sounded awkward), but the owner will have to supply it with electricity, network connections, and water. This may sound ridiculous, but it's mandatory that the container be supplied with water, as this is the cooling agent for the stuff inside. Lack of water may lead to the container melting down, or at least, having its doors welded.

The Modular Datacenter S20 can hold 8 19-inch racks, for a total of 320 RU of rack space. 7 of them provide the necessary server space, while the last one handles networking gear and the monitoring or management applications. The bad part in owning a datacenter on your lawn is the fact that it kind of eats up the energy that was supposed to supply a whole neighborhood. The overall power consumption is situated at 25KW per hour for a single rack and "drinks" 170 liters of water per minute.

If you are determined you'd like this semi-mobile solution, you may choose between 27 models of Sun servers. Well, now I get why Dexter liked so much to play inside the cargo containers when he was a kid.