Monday Jul 16, 2007
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Monday Jul 16, 2007
While I'm not the first to have some information on our first customer Project Blackbox installation, I am the first to post a few of these great pics from the site that Russ Rinfret sent my way!
In case you were under a rock (like me), here are a few informative articles and sites on the installation at Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC):
Here is an awesome link to a QuickTime collection of images that catalog installation of the container. Remember the advantages of the 20' container that Sun has chosen:
Over the course of the video there are a lot of great things to note:
For those that are not-so-inclined to view the video and be entirely happy, here are a few of the pictures I promised!
Here is a shot of the SLAC container hanging around off the crane:
A shot of the crane operator positioning the container on the concrete pad:
And finally, a nice, soothing shot of the data center proving that computing is simply a utility that can be efficiently and serenely placed among the vegetation and out of the way.
Congratulations SLAC and thank you for your support. Enjoy your data center!
(Oh yeah, I updated the "North America" Tour Map below with the SLAC image, click through to the SmugMug Gallery, as always).
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The Project Blackbox Tour was in Helsinki, Finland on July 10th. Turnout continues to be very good. Perhaps more interesting to myself is the amount of press that the tour is receiving overseas, stunning.
The event held on July 10th had about 86 signed in attendees with 4 different press / analysts teams touring. As I go through reports these days, every single report has partners requesting more information and sales calls regarding this thing. This idea continues to have wheels (ok, bad pun).
Here are a list of publications from Finland with articles and information that was published during the tour stop:
We often ask for a post from the local marketing team, I'm providing that inline here. Towards the end, you will find a quote in the local language as well, remember to find your favorite online translation tool if you are non-native!
Blackbox tour in Helsinki was very successful and generated lots of interest among Finnish IT professionals. We held our event in the very heart of Helsinki and in spite of the best holiday season in Finland, the tour gathered together almost 90 attendees from Finland, Baltic countries and even from Spain! Customers really liked the Blackbox demo and Finnish technical team really excelled when presenting the Box. One customer comment put it this way: "Very fancy demo environment. Concrete solution for a common problem!"
"Helsingin Blackbox-kiertue oli sekä asiakkaidemme että omasta mielestämme menestys. Helsingin Narkinkka-torilla sijainnut Blackbox-rekka sai asiakkaidemme lisäksi runsaasti huomiota osakseen sekä ohikulkijoilta, lehdistössä että radiossa. Suomessa harvemmin järjestetään asiakastaphtumia keskellä parasta loma-aikaa; Blackboxin vierailu osoitti todeksi sen, että kun asia on riittävän mielenkiinoinen, tullaan sitä kuuntelemaan vaikka kesken ansaitun loman 
"
Finally, here is a page out of a local newspaper scanned by the marketing team on site. Click through (the image is a link) to see the full size scan.
You can call me old, out of date, etc... but the physical media with stories (rather than electronic posts) puts things into an interesting and very "real" cultural context.
Enjoy!
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Just a quick personal note. The Project Blackbox posts have noticeably slowed in the past 3 weeks. I've been a bit under the weather to say the least, it started as 3 days and I'm in the midst of a several week odyssey of admission/readmission and my own x-ray photo library. This week I should be catching up if all goes well, starting today.
I apologize to any of the regulars and for the posts sitting in my "Inbox" that are behind on being posted. Let's get this thing rolling again
Thursday Jun 21, 2007
The tour spent time in Austria this past week (June 12th in Graz and June 18th in Vienna). Here is an entry from Johannes Dobretsberger, Marketing Manager Austria & Slovakia.
PBB in Austria was a great success. We had two stops in Austria: Graz and Vienna
At Graz we were sponsor at the traditional ACP Forum Partner Event. 500 attendees from all over Austria came to this conference to get an IT update of the local market. The Blackbox Truck was the absolute Highlight of this event. Neither IBM (coming with a nice little pick up) nor the other vendors were able to get attention like Sun from the attendees. At the end of the official program everybody was standing outside around the truck and talking about the innovation power of Sun. Even the marketing manager of ACP is coming to me with the statement: “ Most of the visitors thought that this was not an ACP but rather a Sun event.”
The Vienna event was the Sun event highlight of the year. Never before did more customers and partner attend a local Sun event. Over 250 (!) visitors became evidence of the innovative concept of a mobile data centre of Sun Microsystems. Starting the day with a press conference with 15 journalists from all MID Europe (including a press PBB tour) we afterwards presented to the audience project Blackbox and the future of the data centre. At the end of the conference our local experts invited all attendees to an exclusive PBB tour. The demand was incredible! Until 9pm people were taking the chance for a tour-visit. The event was finished with a great “25 Years of innovation” party!
I would like to thank the PBB Corp team, the conference speakers and our local engineers team (Alexander Kern, Bob Velkov, Reiner Schulz, Günter Hackl, Andreas Neuhold, Alexander F. Jenewein) for the great support.
Especially a big “thank you” to Barry our truck driver for his great job. The Vienna venue was a real challenge but Barry handled this situation with bravery!
Good luck for the coming stops.
Best regards
Johannes
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Friday Jun 15, 2007
Vom 4. bis 7. Juni 2007 machte die Blackbox Station in der Schweiz.
Hoch oben über Zürich, bei wunderschönstem Sommerwetter, konnten
wir am 5. Juni 2007 über 110 Gäste im ehemaligen FIFA Hauptquartier
begrüssen.
Die Blackbox ist ein Magnet - jeder, der sie zum ersten Mal sieht, wird
von ihr magisch angezogen. Eindrücklich, wie viel Leistung auf kleinstem
Raum energiesparend zur Verfügung steht!
In Genf erlebten wir am 7. Juni 2007 die gleiche Begeisterung bei
über 70 Kunden. In Mitten des Finanzdistrikts gehörte die Aufmerksamkeit
aller Passanten uneingeschränkt der Blackbox.
What a quote! This is from Nicole Tanner, Marketing lead for the events in Switzerland. Need a translation? Both AltaVista's Babel Fish Translation and Google's Language Tools work well. Personally, I remember the when I first discovered AltaVista's Babel Fish translator, it must have been 100s of years ago (Internet Time).
Keep in mind, any viewers from overseas can also use these engines to get a rough translation of my own articles as well! No guarantees on quality though.
Tuesday Jun 12, 2007
The tour moves on in Switzerland this week. The unit that is on display has two racks equipped with CPU and Storage from Sun Microsystems. As has been discussed liberally, equipment from other companies can easily fit into the rack if they conform to the standard 19" rack with a depth of less than 30.75". If you've been around racks, you know there are different Rail Mount kits, the current racks use a RETMA rail mount kit.
As a teaser, here are Morey Bevers and Bob Lecoq loading Rack 8! Not everything is automated these days. When you order a Project Blackbox and you decide that Sun Servers are the most efficient payload to be running in your unit, we'll take great care when loading up your Project Blackbox unit, and if you want, we could probably put on some Sun SPOTs to ensure you have the best in shipping.
There are two populated racks in the overseas unit, Rack 8 and Rack 2. The list of contents is from top to bottom, links take you out to the appropriate product page for more details:
Occasionally, Mr. Carvalho gets in and shuffles some equipment around, but that is pretty much the layout!
One very interesting thing about Rack 8 is the inclusion of our Sun Blade 8000, shown below, with two populated blades.
We, of course, had to populate the rack prior to the announcement of our Sun Blade 6000 Series, our new 10 Blade, 10 Rack Unit Modular System.
A couple of other notes on the systems loaded in here, we've been chalking up the rave reviews and excitement in all of our offerings, from software to systems.
Take a look at eWeek's Sun Fire Server Packs Storage Punch. As for the System's Group here at Sun Microsystems, we get it, you want your storage next to your CPUs but you also want options for your storage to be in iSCSI SANs or Fibre Channel SANs. X4500 is a great start but I would have to doubt that we're finished there.
And speaking of data and information, how about that eWeek Excellence Award for ZFS in the E-Business Foundations category.
If you want to refresh yourself on the equipment that the U.S. / Canada Tour had in it, you can go to one of my previous blog posts.
And finally, one aesthetic note. I moved the U.S. / Canadian Tour Map to the bottom of the page. With the U.S. / Canada leg of the tour quiet, I wanted to leave the focus on the tour overseas, but be sure you still had access to the U.S. / Canada Tour map to scroll around and click on your favorite cities to check out the photos. I will keep the tour map down below for now, please continue to enjoy and click through to the SmugMug U.S. Gallery.
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Monday Jun 11, 2007
The beautiful pictures from the tour continue to roll in from Barry, on tour with Project Blackbox throughout Europe. We have some great stops in Austria for the week including:
Here is the Switzerland team in Geneva on June 7th.
For those of us in the United States, those are Neckties.
You will also notice on the event page that the U.S. / Canada Tour has pretty much wound down. Perhaps you can purchase a well-traveled Project Blackbox unit, contact your local sales rep!
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I just passed some email with Jud Cooley, Director of Engineering for Project Blackbox (and one of the co-stars of the Project Blackbox Shake Test Video). The earthquake that the team simulated was the Northridge Earthquake that occurred on January 17, 1994 outside of Los Angeles. This earthquake had a magnitude of 6.7 on the Richter Scale.
To simulate the quake, the team used about 1.7G of lateral shock.
The team also did additional testing of up to 2.0G using sawtooth waves. These are worse than the rolls of the earthquake simulation.
For the original posts on the shake test, be sure to check out
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