Photos: Data centre in a shipping container

Sun is claiming only one definite customer for the facility: Stanford University, which picked one up for the high-performance needs of its Linear Accelerator Center earlier this year. On Friday the storage giant pointed to interest from an unidentified global airline and an international telecommunications company.

The portability and convenience of the data centre also makes it ideal for the oil and gas industries, says Sun, as it can be put where the fossil fuel is discovered. The same goes for disaster relief, as a box could be shipped in to revive a metropolitan area's fallen communications. But Sun sees the largest segment of its market being communications companies or application service providers looking to increment their capacity in a manageable way.

Microsoft Futures