Photos: Data centre in a shipping container

On Friday Sun invited ZDNet.co.uk to an army museum in London to see what it is calling the world's first "virtualised data centre" — basically a data centre housed in a standard 20-foot shipping container. The company is referring to it as "virtualised" because, like a virtualised application, it can be moved around independently of any infrastructure.

Sun claims that the facility is 20 percent more energy efficient than a standard data centre and takes a tenth of the time to deploy. At €500k (£343k) without the servers, switches and so on, it is also significantly cheaper than a bricks-and-mortar data centre. Sun is also offering short-term leases of the box.

Rather than having "Sun" emblazoned across its side, the final product will be white and as anonymous as most shipping containers. Representatives of the company claimed that some potential customers have requested "rust-ised" containers to make them even less attractive to potential data thieves.