On Tuesday, the Texas computing giant took the wraps off what it calls the Dell Tactical Mobile Data Center — a kind of data-center-in-a-box that’s specifically designed for military outfits looking to air-lift temporary computing power into emergency situations. According to John Fitzgerald — the chief technology officer of the Dell business unit that serves the federal government and a former U.S. Army officer — this 100-foot-wide data center can not only withstand 3 gs, it’s designed to blend in with its surroundings.
“It’s meant to look like any other supply container,” he tells Wired, “so that it won’t be targeted as some sort of high-value asset.”
Data center containers are nothing new. As AOL data center guru and former Microsoft data center man Mike Manos 10 Comments and 224 Reactions, you can trace this sort of thing all the way back to the Department of Defense of the 1960s, but in recent years, they’ve undergone a renaissance. About seven years ago, Google started piecing together its data centers using shipping containers stuffed with servers, storage hardware, and networking gear, and this inspired similar efforts across the computing industry.
Read more at Wired
