Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Project blackbox !

Check this out - project blackbox is finally out !
Yep, they mean it literally :-)
Check out the pics here - what they call "scenarios" : I like the last one ;-)

Man , this is totally cool engineering ! And very wacky when you think about it - which makes it more awesome :-D

5 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Nice. I'm not a business person so I can't say how good it will do i the market but it definitely has hack value.

How long was this in development?

10/18/2006 03:34:00 PM  
Blogger Mridul said...

@ Anonymous

I am not sure of the business angle too ... but I can imagine it being terribly useful to have - and we are told that customers are already lined up for this !

How long ? I am not really sure - GregP mentions that he has been thinking about it for 2 years .... not sure when it was actually concieved and pulled into action.

10/18/2006 07:00:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Since you're working at Sun, you'd definitely be told that the whole world is just dying to buy the product. :)

Anyway... These sort of complexes suck a lot of power. Don't they? If you're transporting it to a relief station (like what was shown in the picture), you'd have to tug along a pretty heavy generator too. Wouldn't you?

10/19/2006 02:10:00 PM  
Blogger Mridul said...

As a general note about product development : the process of productising something is a much more involved than a simple matter of selling the idea to people within ...
Due diligence is done and you have to establish the viability of the investment to be made. The possibility of (other) technological advances , alternatives , risks (too long to list) that exists are factored in while making a decision.
Does not make the process foolproof - but it is not a case of people telling me that whole world is dying to buy it :-)

Btw , most of the info I provided here was from public sites ... I would definitely not post anything which is not public !

The reason I posted it was for the hack value - I dont work in marketting ;-)
To me , it has amazing hack value - I would love to think up something along these lines : it is an amazing engineering problem , and the solution is as innovative as it is simple !
And more importantly , there is a real pressing need for solutions like this - I would be really impressed if more products which keep environmental considerations in mind come out into the market !

Even if this had been done by any other company , I would have posted it !!

10/20/2006 10:47:00 AM  
Blogger Mridul said...

About power - dont go by everything you see in the pics : under scenarios , there is also one about project blackbox being run on mars ;-) (http://www.sun.com/emrkt/blackbox/images/zot_bb_scenario_2.jpg)

You will need cooling , network connectivity and power : and I would assume all of them have to be moderately reliable.
Ofcourse you should contrast it with existing level of infrastructure and investment required for running a datacenter !
At the end of the day , this is a datacenter : not the PC in my basement :-)

10/20/2006 10:52:00 AM  

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