Datacenter in a Box

PBS | I, Cringely . November 17, 2005 - Google-Mart
The Waynester sayz:

holy crap ... google is putting datacenters into shipping containers? 5000 Opterons and multiple petabytes? We have about that much here at work(maybe a weeee bit more) ... on a football field sized area!
If that turns out to be true, and workable ... well ... read the linkie ... Bob pretty much spells it out.

(Editor's note: The Waynester works for one of the Baby Bells, so when he says it is comparable to his datacenter we're talking mondo datacenter)

Google hired a pair of very bright industrial designers to figure out how to cram the greatest number of CPUs, the most storage, memory and power support into a 20- or 40-foot box. We're talking about 5000 Opteron processors and 3.5 petabytes of disk storage that can be dropped-off overnight by a tractor-trailer rig. The idea is to plant one of these puppies anywhere Google owns access to fiber, basically turning the entire Internet into a giant processing and storage grid.

Pretty cool article. The really interesting part isn't the datacenter, but the speculation on what Google will do with them.