I had hoped that Sun Micrososytems wasn’t going to fade away after its dot-com-decline. The decline finally did for Scott McNeally earlier this year and placed Jonathan Schwartz on his erstwhile throne. Jon’s doing well. Actually I have to confess that I’ve grown partial to him from reading his blog (http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan) which is intelligent (IMHO) and doesn’t over-promote Sun.

Jon was out meeting the press this week to tell them about Sun’s Data-Center-In-A-Box—that’s not a brand name, just a convenient description of an array of computers in a container. Assuming that you want such an array (consisting of 35 AMD or SPARC servers packed into a container) then $500,000 looks like an economical price to me, because you can park this container anywhere that has a 500 kW (redundant) power supply, Internet connection and a water supply.

This means not having to build a new data center any time, soon if ever. You just keep on adding containers until you run out of parking space and then you buy more parking space close to an electricity supply. You may not appreciate how clever this idea if you are unfamiliar with the economics of building data centers. For starters, data centers are the most expensive office space there is, more expensive even than plushly furnished boardrooms that are rarely occupied. (Think massive air conditioning, raised floors, sprinkler systems, etc.)

Also, nowadays we have the cooling issue, born of the fact that Moore’s Law didn’t just give us fast chips, it gave us hot chips. Sun addresses this issue with a “cyclonic cooling” system (which works just fine in a container) that it claims is 5 times as space efficient as a traditional data center and 10–15 percent more power efficient.

As a quick aside here, I’ve noticed that major server vendors—IBM, HP and Sun—are all positioning themselves as “cool” server vendors in various ways, and yet there’s a severe trend out there of data centers getting too hot. Are we to presume that it’s all the fault of Dell?

But never mind, I’m inclined to believe that Sun has come up with a very neat solution here. It may drive a whole new trend with its data-center-in-a-box, and if it does, then Sun may soon be whole lot stronger and on balance that will be good for the industry.