2007: The year's photo highlights

Sun has committed heavily this year to the concept of recreating a data centre in a portable container — ideal for disaster-recovery situations where the original data centre or storage network has become unavailable.

Housed in a 20-foot shipping container, the company refers to its offering as a "virtualised data centre", because it can be moved around independently of any infrastructure.

Sun claims its offering is 20 percent more energy efficient than a standard data centre and takes a tenth of the time to deploy.

Rather than having "Sun" emblazoned across the side, the final product will be less of a give-away to thieves, coming in an all-white finish. Some interested business customers have also requested that rust is added to the outside of the data centre to further deter any unwanted interest. 

Microsoft Futures