Sun launches Blackbox, worlds first virtualized data center

Sun recently unveiled Blackbox, world’s first modular data center. From the launch site:

“is a prototype of the world’s first virtualized datacenter–built into a shipping container and optimized to deliver extreme energy, space, and performance efficiencies.”

What is truly remarkable about this is the way data center problems have been approached. I mean, which tech company in world does not own data centers, but who has dared to think outside the box? Simplistic enough, though never occurred to any other company, fitting a data center (which would stand among the world’s 200 most powerful supercomputers) into a shipyard is obviously a technical challenge, and would bust any data center’s owner’s woes of space, power and time to market. Truly great !!

Things like these make Sun truly a remarkable and innovative company. More information on this: Sun’s official web launch, Jonathan Schwartz‘s blog and Greg Papadopoulos‘s blog.

Google Apps for Your Domain

Google launched Google Apps for Your Domain yesterday. Available in two versions, standard (free) version and a premium version (not available as of now), the product includes: Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar and Google Personalized Homepage.

Initially it may look like that the move is directed by google to augment its cold war strategies against microsoft, the move looks more symbiotic than competitive. As Nicholos Carr nicely describes the Microsoft-Google axis, the duopoly is strong enough to threaten any other competition in the market.

EC2 from Amazon

Starting with a good news. Amazon has recently rolled on its EC2(Elastic compute cloud) service. Looks like a good competition to Sun Grid.