By Matthew Dublin

Back in 2006, Sun came onto the scene with idea of a pre-configured, portable data center, packed into a shipping container. The main selling points for these prepackaged modular solutions are that they cost just a fraction of the amount needed to build a fixed data center, are easily deployed, and In certain sectors, and in the case of Sun's "Project Blackbox" solution which it rolled the fall of 2006, uses roughly 25 percent less energy. While customers such as Amazon and Google quickly took advantage of the new design, adoption has been slow in the academic and scientific computing markets but interest is growing. Purdue University has recently announced that their Steele cluster is being moved into HP's "POD" solution, which is being marketed as a "data center in a box" (or shipping container to be exact).

Purdue is one of the first academic centers to makes use of this type of approach to data center management. By implementing the portable data center, Purdue IT staff believe that the university can expand its research capabilities by 50 percent within months for less than a third of the cost of building a new data center.

"Other universities have expressed a lot of interest in what we're doing," says Lon Ahlen, facilities manager for Information Technology at Purdue, Purdue's central information technology organization. "We're using natural cooling much of the year," Ahlen says. "This should be the most efficient data center we've put together."

The Steele cluster contains more than 900 nodes with more than 7,200 processing cores generates a lot of heat, but Ahlen says much of the system's cooling needs will now be met by Indiana's chilly winters, resulting in a significant reduction of the campus's water cooling systems.