Rackable Systems, Inc. was given the 2007 “LinuxWorld.com Product Excellence Award” in the category of “Most Innovative Hardware Solution” for its modular data center product, Concentro at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in California this week.

Rackable’s Concentro addresses the need for increased data center space while reducing up-front costs and operational expenses accociated with building a brick and mortar data center. The self-contained, fully portable data-center-in-a-box is packed with servers, storage and highly efficient cooling.

Sun Microsystems has a similar product called Project Blackbox.

Housed in a secure, nondescript, weather-tight 40’ x 8’ shipping container, Concentro can hold up to 1200U of servers or storage systems and compute density levels of up to 9600 cores and storage capacity of up to 3.5 petabytes. Concentro’s unique cooling and DC power technology dramatically reduce cooling costs by as much as 80% over traditional data centers, the company reports.

The ability to deploy a Concentro container rapidly and in any location allows businesses to add redundancy and business continuity, allowing for easy hardware migration and an expedited disaster recovery process. The units can be situated away from the home data center site and remotely managed at the server, rack and container level using Rackable Systems’ Roamer remote management technology.