Granted, people have seen stranger things on this corner before: sometimes Falun Gong members protest here, simulating the tortures they say take place in China; often companies give out cereal, cold remedy or water samples; always hawkers shout, “Free AM newspaper!” which few people take them up on, figuring if it’s free it’s probably not worthwhile. The hulking Sun truck, though definitely eye-catching, attracted little notice.

But I digress. What Sun was displaying today was its Project Blackbox, a mini, modular data-center-in-a-shipping container that will be priced at “under $500,000” and can be shipped most anywhere by truck or semiwide trailer. The box can hold eight standard racks that in turn can hold 19” server or storage units (or both) for a total of 250 servers or 1.5 petabytes of disk storage. The container is equipped with fans and a water-cooled heat exchanger; a de-humidifier, sensors, alarms and GPS. Power must be supplied by a generator or, more likely, a nearby building. The box weighs 20,000 pounds.

As a small group of writers huddled around the space heater in front of the container, David Douglas, vice president of Eco Responsibility for Sun (pictured facing camera), told us about the trends that led to this offering: Customers are running out of space, power and cooling in some of their buildings, particularly in crowded metropolitan areas like Manhattan -- such companies might put a Blackbox in a New Jersey warehouse or on a rooftop. Customers such as universities have temporary data center needs that need to be met quickly; if a college has a three-year project, it can’t spend two years building the underlying infrastructure. Customers are seeking new approaches to disaster recovery – a container could be quickly delivered to an area hit with a tornado or hurricane. And many customers are backing away from investing in buildings and looking for alternatives. Douglas says some Wall Street firms have spoken of positioning Blackbox containers near trading floors.

Douglas says the Blackbox is 15% to 20% more energy efficient than the same equipment in a traditional data center due to uniform and effective cooling. Air blows horizontally at a constant speed, rather than requiring acceleration and deceleration. In fact, Sun has filed five patents around this cooling system.

The container we toured was filled with Sun equipment, but Sun is willing to configure a box with HP, Dell, IBM or other hardware.

Why roll a container next to your building rather than use a hosted service? “Having the container close by makes IT problems easy to fix and changes easy to configure,” Douglas says. “And you can put it wherever you can get the best power rates.”

Although this product was introduced October 18, at the time only one container had been assembled. Today there are four, although none have been purchased yet.

Paul McDougall at InformationWeek asked the key question, “How long did it take you to get permission to park this in New York City?” The answer: three months. “It cost us 240 times as much to do this here than it did in Minneapolis and approval took a week there,” Douglas said.