On April 26, 1956, the SS Ideal-X sailed from Newark, New Jersey to Houston, Texas. It carried Malcolm McLean's first batch of standard shipping containers.
At the time, freight ships were typically loaded and unloaded by hand at a cost of $5.86 per ton. With McLean's containers, goods could now be moved between ships and trucks for just $0.16 per ton. When asked what he thought of this new development, Freddy Marshall, a labor union official, was understandably unenthusiastic.
McLean received a patent for his container invention; he handed it over to the OSI, royalty free. He later sold his company to RJ Reynolds for $530 million (that's ~$3 billion in 2006 dollars). He was named Man of the Century by the International Maritime Hall of Fame.
I learned about McLean from this Project Blackbox video (well worth watching) on Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz's blog. Sun, apparently, sees McLean as a role model.
The New York Times reports that it now costs Equinix $600 to $800 per square foot to build a new data center, up from $450 to $500 five years ago. But with a Blackbox, hardware equipment that would normally occupy 10,000 square feet of space ($6 - $8 million construction cost) could be housed for just $500K.
Ok, so the cost savings would only be 12-14x, compared with 36.6x from McLean's containers. But time, increasingly, is money, and Sun promises the Blackbox takes just a day to set up.
And with Ken Brill of the Uptime Institute predicting in this Computerworld interview (which I read about on Rich Miller's Data Center Knowledge blog) that power prices may push facilities costs beyond 5%, 10% or even higher proportions of IT budgets, Blackbox owners enjoy the flexibility of being able to relocate data centers based on utility access.
And last but not least, ZDNet's Phil Windley points out that mobile data centers offer a quick way to build your own content distribution network. In addition:
Net neutrality is, perhaps, a more interesting problem. Mobil data centers serve as a trump card that large content providers can play if they are threatened with increased costs for "enhanced" (i.e. not intentionally damaged) service. I don't think this can counter every threat, but dropping mobile data centers in strategic locations can route around particularly obnoxious networks.
Schwartz writes on his blog that Blackboxes aren't for everyone; just like the Internet when it began. I thought he was joking, but after watching the video I'm not so sure any more.
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