Data Center in a Shipping Container

In the last two years Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Microsoft and SGI have offered complete data centers in standard 40x8 ft and 20x8 ft shipping containers, occupying 320 and 160 square feet respectively. Such data centers have the capacity of up to 29.5 petabytes of storage and up to 46,080 CPU cores of processing power.

The current costs of petabyte files range from $117,000/petabyte to $826,000 and declining steeply.* Therefore the costs of a container filled with petabytes will be anywhere from $3.5 million to $24.4 million depending on the features chosen.

The 300 petabytes for support of the entire Navy would be about $90 million, which is within the range of affordability when one considers the Navy’s total IT budget of $7.3 billion.

*http://pstrassmann.blogspot.com/2010/07/petabyte-files-for-cloud-computing.html