Dawn of the Dead

Road show 2.0: In Minneapolis, David Douglas, Sun’s vice president for “eco-responsibility,” shows off Project Blackbox, a new plug-and-play data center in a shipping container.

Chipper: Greg Papadopoulos persuaded Sun in 2002 to abandon a chip that the company had already spent $500 million on in favor of a radical design that promised to be faster and more energy efficient.

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Project Blackbox may be Schwartz's biggest initiative to date, and the one that best reflects his vision for the new Sun. The idea of a data center in a shipping container did not originate with Sun or with Google--the concept is usually attributed to Brewster Kahle, a Thinking Machines veteran and founder of the Internet Archive. But it is Schwartz who nurtured and introduced the Blackbox in a bid to give Sun a new signature product and marketing vehicle. As part of his push for environmentalism, he hired back Sun alumnus David Douglas as vice president of "eco-responsibility" and put him in charge of developing the Blackbox. One goal of the project: to produce more computing power using less energy. In today's big data centers, it costs almost as much to power up the computers and cool the buildings from the resulting heat as it does to purchase the equipment. The Blackbox promises 20% greater energy efficiency than a typical corporate data center, due in part to its innovative cooling system.

This spring, Douglas has been shepherding the Blackbox on a cross-country tour to show off what's inside: a plug-and-play data center that a customer can hook up to a power line, a data line, and a cold-water line for cooling, and have running in minutes after it comes off the truck. The 250 servers are mounted on racks atop big spring-coil shock absorbers (in case the whole container is dropped by a forklift operator, which has happened), the advanced cooling system is fully engineered, the software is loaded and ready. If equipped with $3,000 servers from the lower end of Sun's Niagara line, Douglas says, a Blackbox would rank as the 170th-fastest supercomputer in the world--for a price in the low $1 million range, a fraction of what building a data center from scratch would cost.

"You can't find out if you're right until you take the risk," says Papadopoulos, Sun's chief technology officer.

Sun is closemouthed about prelaunch buyers. Gartner's McLellan says that she and her colleagues are "almost entirely convinced" that Sun has been building Blackboxes for Google. (Google, notoriously secretive about its technology, won't comment.) Silicon Valley is buzzing that Microsoft may be a customer--or be building something similar. James Hamilton, a technologist on Microsoft's Windows Live team, said this spring that portable data centers in shipping containers were "an idea whose time has come" and could create "a competitive advantage."

“For a month, I took a lot of drugs to sleep," says Greg Papadopoulos. Sun's chief technology officer is recalling the days after he convinced his colleagues to scrap a half-billion-dollar investment Sun had made on a new silicon chip. At a 2002 strategy meeting in McNealy's office, as obits were being written for the dotcom era and the company's stock price continued to tumble, Papadopoulos argued that the hundreds of millions of dollars spent developing the chip should be chalked up as yesterday's mistake and instead Sun should pony up new money for a radical new chip design. His idea was to divide a chip into eight independently operating sections, called "cores," each of which could handle four separate computational threads at a time. It would be like having 32 different brains working at once on the same piece of silicon, and, he contended, it could be much faster and more energy efficient. It was a gamble. "But you can't find out if you're right until you take the risk," Papadopoulos says. He got the green light (and the sleepless nights), and over the next three years, Sun invested millions in his bold idea. Even as the company bled money, management poured about 15% of revenues into R&D, roughly the same percentage as Microsoft and Intel.

The chip that ultimately emerged has helped Sun win back its reputation as a leader in technology. It's at the heart of the company's Niagara servers, introduced in December 2005, which power the Blackbox. Aside from speed and bragging rights--no one else had yet marketed a chip with four cores, let alone eight--the Niagaras also offered energy savings. A Niagara chip runs on only 70 watts, less than many common household lightbulbs, and one-third as much as a typical industry chip. California's Pacific Gas & Electric even offers rebates for companies that replace their old servers with cooler Niagaras, and Douglas, the VP of eco-responsibility, says a dozen other public utilities are looking at incentives, too. Sun sold more than $400 million worth of servers in their first year on the market. Douglas says Niagara is already saving the planet 257,000 tons of carbon-dioxide emissions a year. "Sun has driven the industry to report not just 'top speed' and 'zero to sixty' but to look at 'miles per gallon,'" says Mark Bramfitt, a program manager at PG&E who works with the utility's high-tech customers. Heather Peck, eBay's infrastructure manager, says installing some Niagaras has saved the company money. "Niagaras run much cooler than our previous servers," she says, "and they're scary fast." While eBay can't replant its 16,000-server farm all at once, she says that Niagaras have become the company's "platform of choice" for its database.