Intel developing portable data centres

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Intel has announced it is investigating portable data centres, hoping tto cut costs of construction, maintenance and cooling.

Sun explored the idea a year ago with project Blackbox, and Rackable also had a similar system. Both Microsoft and Google have also been linked to similar plans, but have failed to bring anything to market.

"The cost of building a new data centre is extremely high - between $40 million (£19 billion) and $60 million. As an alternative, we are considering placing high-density servers on racks in a container similar to those you see on container ships and trucks," said Mertin Menard, director of Intel's platform capability group, in an Intel magazine article.

"We estimate that the same server capacity in this container solution will reduce facility costs by 30 to 50 per cent versus a brick-and-mortar installation."

Menard adds that building a warehouse to house the containers might be cheaper than building a new data centre from scratch.

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