KEY CONCEPTS
Massive computing power can now be delivered to anyone’s doorstep inside a standard 20-foot shipping container.
The box provides up to 250 servers boasting seven terabytes of active memory and two petabytes of storage—enough resources to support 10,000 desktop users.
Sun Microsystems says its turnkey system can be operational for one-hundredth the cost of building a traditional data center.
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The beefy boxes could also quickly expand the Internet’s computing and storage capacity, ushering in so-called cloud computing, where individuals rely on nimble personal devices that are unencumbered with basic software and instead use programs that reside on the Net.
—The Editors
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