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MANA GEMENT STRATEGIES F O R THE CL OUD R EV OL UTION

FOREST Container packed with x86 servers. Verari designs
the power and cooling features and rack layout in its FOREST
containers. Not a lot has been published about the exact de-
sign of the servers, other than to say that some were produced
by NASA Ames’s Silicon Valley neighbor, Cisco Systems, which
was clearly looking for a marquee customer for its new Uni-

fied Computing System servers. Cisco entered the market for
virtualized blade servers in the summer of 2009. A second sup-
plier was Silicon Mechanics, a Bothell, Washington, supplier
of rack mount servers designed for virtualization and cluster
computing.
Buying servers in a container shipping unit means that
NASA Ames doesn’t need to plan a construction site two years

in advance or build a building with a raised data center floor.
According to Dell, which is also in the business of packing
shipping containers with servers, a unit can be ordered, built,
and delivered in 90 days.
NASA Ames CIO Chris Kemp hasn’t commented on the
specifics of the servers, but he says that the plug-in, shipping
container format suits NASA’s goals. In an interview with
InformationWeek’s Nick Hoover, Kemp said that he plans to add
more containers with the goal of moving them around. “The

container model is great because we can move them wherever
we need them,” he said. (“NASA Launches Portable Cloud
Effort,” December 17, 2009.)
NASA, for example, will be able to place containers at uni-
versities collaborating with the agency on space research or
even at launch sites. Containers will be able to be moved
around and plugged in, like those delivered by truck, and

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