Jonathan Schwartz Blog: As I've been saying for a while, our customers - more specifically, a segment* of our customers - face a diversity of tough challenges. What does the CIO in midtown Manhattan do when she runs out of roof space or power? How does an aid agency deliver basic connectivity to 5,000 relief workers in a tsunami stricken metropolis? What does an oil company do when they want to move high performance analytics onto an offshore platform or supertanker? Or a large web services company do when they want to cookie cutter their infrastructure next to a hyrdroelectric plant for cheap power - within weeks, not years?

None of these are easy problems to solve - especially one computer at a time. They're more commonplace than you'd think across the globe. And now you know the motivation behind our asking a simple question, "what would the perfect datacenter look like?"

Improving upon its father, the traditional datacenter, it'd have to be more space and power efficient. Very high performance, and designed for machines, not people with plush offices. It'd have to be available within weeks, not years. And portable, to allow customers to deploy it anywhere - in a disaster area, or next to a hydro generator.

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Project Blackbox at Sun...