Intel planning portable data centres

 

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By Matthew Sparkes

Posted on 22 Nov 2007 at 10:05

Intel has announced that it is the latest in a string of companies to investigate portable data centres. The company claims that construction, maintenance and cooling costs are all cheaper than with traditional data centres.

Sun explored the idea a year ago with project Blackbox, and Rackable also has a similar system. Both Microsoft and Google have also been linked to similar plans, but have failed to bring anything to market.

"The cost of building a new data centre is extremely high - between $40 million and $60 million. As an alternative, we are considering placing high-density servers on racks in a container similar to those you see on container ships and trucks," says Martin Menard, director of Intel's platform capability group, in an Intel magazine article.

"We estimate that the same server capacity in this container solution will reduce facility costs by 30-50% versus a brick-and-mortar installation."

Menard adds that building a warehouse to house the containers might be cheaper than building a new data centre from scratch.