SAN-in-a-can

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IBM has bundled our midrange DS4000 disk with SAN networking switch in a convenient 42U-high rack, and nicknamed thisSAN-in-a-can.

In SearchDataCenter.com, Matt Stanberry's article Sun rolls out data center Winnebago indicates Sun has taken IBM's SAN-in-a-can concept to the next level.

This is an interesting development. To understand it better, we need to go back to the 1930s. Malcolm McLean invented the shipping container in the 1930s in New Jersey, and later founded Sea-Land corporation. Rather than unpacking products from a ship, load onto a truck, then move those products onto a train, his innovation was to create a container that could be packed full of products, carried from ship, to truck, to train, without loading and unloading individual products as transportation means change. He named the size of his container "TEU".

TEU = 20 ft x 8.5 ft x 8.5 ft
(twenty-foot equivalent unit)

In 1966, the standard shape and size was adopted by International Organization for Standardization (ISO).Today, over 90% of freight containers are 1 or 2 TEU

Sun's announcement is that they have packed up to 240 UNIX servers into a single TEU container. This can be dropped off at your facility, hook up your power and cooling, and start running. An alternative version is a disk-farm-in-a-can, having the TEU container filled with up to 2 PB of disk storage capacity.

technorati tags: IBM, DS4000, disk, SAN, SAN-in-a-can, Matt Stanberry, Malcom McLean, Sea-Land, TEU, twenty-foot-equivalent, ISO, standard, UNIX, facility