You could also look at that picture as the high BW network; 10PB at ~65mph. That’s 10PB from L.A. to N.Y., as an example, in 3 days!

@Quli – You’re right – Sun does have containers for servers too. I’m not sure there are lots of server huggers that cozy up next to their Sparc hardware these days.

@Richard – I was actually thinking of adding a part of the blog talking about disaster recovery. You could, like a mobile home, drive from one container park to another if you had adequate warning of an impending disaster. Or, as you point out, you could just hug your servers in two different container parks.

@Chris Street – Claustrophobia aside, the main point I am making is that server huggers want their servers in a metro location. Real estate and build out costs are too high to do this at scale, so an outside container park on a small plot of land could make sense. In terms of power and water, you are right that a container would take some good amounts of power. I do think it would be less than the same number of servers in a data center as they would be more densely packed and cooled more efficiently. Concerning physical security in a single container, you are right there might be an issue there. Still, server huggers already share cages and racks (and half racks) so I think the precedent is there in the industry. Do you want to hug your server in a crowded room a few blocks away in the metro area or do you want to drive a few hours to get there? You do bring up a good point about tornadoes, but since I am advocating building container parks in a metro area I think we’re safe from being tornado magnets :)

@Josh – thanks and good point about DR. Given the choice of having a part of a container on a plot of land downtown versus being hosted in the cloud or hours away and assuming the same prices, what would your choice be?

@David, Business Technology Roundtable – Roger answered well (thanks!). The main point as I see it is that real estate for server huggers to host their servers in metro areas is scare and expensive. Can we put densely packed servers in containers and help alleviate the market scarcity at a reasonable price?

Managed and hosted services have to live SOMEWHERE. Currently they live in expensive data centers. Those managed and hosted services employ lots of server huggers – because otherwise their managed and hosted clients wouldn’t have reliable service.

Those data centers are expensive, in terms of real estate, building, electrical and cooling costs. To the extent you can reduce any of those costs, you can reduce the cost of operating a data center to provide managed and hosted services (or cloud services, which frankly is just another version of managed services, as far as I’m concerned).

The mobile server park concept seems like a solution that may appeal to this type of individual. However, isn’t it simply easier to embrace a managed or hosted service solution? You say “the choice seems somewhat obvious.” Perhaps it will be to the most obsessive/compulsive IT manager, but is this really suitable for those in the mainstream?

As Richard said, I would have concerns about using this type of facility as a primary location, but I see a lot of benefits as providing a DR or temporary DC solution.

There are a couple of basic assumptions that this seems to forget about the container data center model. First, you still need some basic inputs such as power and water. If this is going to be done at scale, I don’t believe that you would put the containers outside, rather it would be more like a bunch of containers in a warehouse building. This is being done by a couple of the cloud folks (MSFT is one high profile firm). This also allows you to control the physical security a bit more.

The other aspect that seems to be missing is that the container is a rather large chunk of computing power. Most web applications run on a lot less than the 1000+ servers that a single container would hold. Unless you started partitioning the containers, it would be hard for folks to justify that much overcapacity. Under that model, you would still have some folks uneasy about physical security concerns and what would you do when 10 server huggers all needed to be working on their machines at the same time? Space would be tight…

Lastly, trailer parks (as anyone from the midwest will tell you) seem to be magnets for tornadoes. Tornadoes and containers would not be a good mix, therefore, it would seem to still make sense to put these items in warehouse buildings.