Rackable Systems' ICE Cube Takes Data Centers Modular
The Integrated Concentro Environment (ICE) center, which can hold 4.1 petabytes of storage in a standard shipping container, is also designed to maximize power while minimizing cooling costs and energy usage. Read More
The Integrated Concentro Environment (ICE) center, which can hold 4.1 petabytes of storage in a standard shipping container, is also designed to maximize power while minimizing cooling costs and energy usage.
This is the second modular data center created by Rackable, and the ICE design not only offers either a 20′ x 8′ shipping container or the full-sized 40′ x 8′ container. The ICE Cube holds 20 percent greater density levels, up to 11,200 processing cores in the 40-foot container.
The data center is designed to house as many as 1,400 of Rackable Systems’ Eco-Logical rack-mounted DC powered servers or storage systems, and can be custom-built and configured in a matter of weeks, the company said.
“The data center is now mobile and modular, achieving reductions in energy and facility costs by as much as 50 percent,” said Mark J. Barrenechea, Rackable’s CEO. “And ICE Cube can dramatically reduce deployment times — enabling design to deployment of a fully-functional, built-to-order data center in a mere 90 days or less.”
The company estimates that using the a unique cooling technology — the company takes out the fans from each individual server and uses fans to circulate cold air and remove hot air — the ICE Cube can reducing cooling and air handler power costs by as much as 80 percent over a traditional data center design.
Rackable faces competition in this field from Sun Microsystems, which announced its own modular data center, called Project Blackbox, in October 2006.
