How can I top last week’s prediction about Google’s shipping container data centers? By explaining a bit more about how the system came to be and how it will work.

In last week’s column I told how Google has been experimenting with portable data centers built in standard 40-foot shipping containers. The idea isn’t new and it isn’t even Google’s. As far as I can tell it came originally from Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive, who wants to replicate the archive here and there around the world and figured that a shipping container filled with servers and disk drives might be the easiest way to do so. Not only is it truly plug-and-play, but it is also a heck of a lot cheaper from a bit-schlepping perspective. Carrying a petabyte data center by ship from California to Australia is the virtual equivalent of an OC-192 optical connection - the world’s most powerful SneakerNet.