Nice container, where's the manual
What a cracking idea this is - a
preconfigured data centre from Sun in the shape of a container (well, it is a container), that doesn't even need to be forklifted into the building. While it is targeted at data centre expansion projects, it brings commoditisation to a new level. Sun, perhaps with a hat-tip to
Google, should be applauded for its innovation.
There is an opportunity here that I hope will not be overlooked. What of the user manuals? We can bang on about IT service management, IT governance, COBIT and ITIL being places for operational management to get to, but here we really do have an integrated set of systems that can benefit from best practice management out of the - ahem - box. By treating the data centre as a black box, we can also apply a black box approach to management. Fault management? Here's the integrated console. Backup and restore? All taken care of, swap the tapes once a week. Disaster recovery? Here's a second crate. If Sun is seeing this just as a hardware deployment mechanism, they are missing a trick; its actually a way to get IT done the way it should be done.
