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Comment by cryptonector | Hacker News Reader

It would be interesting to sell a data center in a container. Cooling, power supply, compute, storage, and network, all in a box. You supply power, a big network pipe, and the piping to external heat exchangers.

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See §Examples:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modular_data_center

Also:

* https://www.deltapowersolutions.com/en/mcis/data-center-solu...

* https://atos.net/en/solutions/high-performance-computing-hpc...

* https://www.zelladc.com/zella-max

Search for "shipping container data centre" or "containerized datacenter".

Huawei also does this. Built to order, single container. Completely isolated, plug’n’play.

AWS does that already for the defense industry: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/publicsector/announcing-aws-mod...

I know one company who offers that (there might be more): https://www.grando.ai/en/container

> It would be interesting to sell a data center in a container.

Sun did that experiment:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Modular_Datacenter

Yeah, I'm aware, but I didn't think they were serious about it.

That's entirely fair: Sun wasn't serious about most of the products they rolled out... and customers noticed.

IIJ has a project like this, data center in a container, just add power. They build it all up in Japan, ship it to rural areas across the world to basically jumpstart a local data center (I imagine mostly for industrial sites). They had a fun project where they had a half rack, powered by solar and connected to the net via Starlink.

There are whitebox Windows laptops, OpenWRT routers, Arduino boards, ArduPilot drones, etc. It almost sounds strange that there are no prepopulated 12U racks intended for OpenStack(is that still a thing?)

No idea how they do things today, but v0.1 of Azure (before it was called Azure) was a bunch of containers in a field. I remember seeing an aerial photo at the time.

There are quite a few companies selling “modular data centers” now.

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