I just happened to surf over to the Sun website today and ran across Proejct Blackbox. a quote from the website: “Project Blackbox is a prototype of the world’s first virtualized data center–built into a shipping container and optimized to deliver extreme energy, space, and performance efficiencies.”

I didn’t spend more than 10 seconds thinking about this before I thought…that doesn’t make sense. The whole concept of a ‘portable’ data center for quick capacity addition make sense. Take a shipping container, insert a cooling system, power system (with one huge plug!), and 1U servers and presto…instant portable mini-data center.

The problem…why in the world would you paint the thing black? (I’ll get to the logos in a bit)

Let me see if I remember back to my high school physics courses….black absorbs light, white reflects it….got it. Big steel container with hot computers running inside of it. The container is designed to just be dropped off in the parking lot next to your data center…most likely in the direct sun. Let’s paint it black so it get even hotter and paint a big Sun Log on it so everyone knows what it is (psst: guys…ever wonder why most of your customer’s data centers don’t have big signs out front that says “XYZ Corp. Data Center”?)

This seems to be a great example of Marketing taking over a technology project and making bad decisions based on the need to add value (note: I have worked in marketing, and have great friends who are marketing wizards…). Let’s hope that common and business sense takes over for Sun on this project before this prototype goes into production.