Data Center In A Box

What if the next time the government must meet a sudden upsurge in Internet capacity (say after another hurricane or during the next war), it can send an entire data center contained within a 20-foot data shipping container?

Microsoft architect James Hamilton says it can be done.

He proposes that chilled-water cooled servers packed into durable shipping containers could act as a self-contained data center with enough redundancy to last three to five years.

Hamilton says the impetus for the creation of such units will be not so much emergency response as the emerging popularity of software as a service. But he notes that shipping data centers whole would be an enormously agile solution to sudden scaling needs. It would also cut down on administrative costs and eliminate system outages caused by human error. For an ever-thrifty federal government, they may be worth investigating.

(Hat tip: Geeking With Greg.)