I have good memories of working with Sun’s hardware, namely a couple of E250 boxes that ran web application and database servers. They were solidly built and completely reliable.

It’s a feature of their hardware that Sun wants to tout now, with its Project Blackbox portable datacenters. They demonstrated how a Blackbox would fare if an earthquake happened to hit where one was located.

Since one can’t schedule an earthquake in advance, Sun took a Blackbox to the University of San Diego for a stint on the Seismic Response Modification Device, also known as the ‘shake table.’

Sun sent along a link to the video on YouTube. The video "shows Project Blackbox surviving a Northridge-equivalent earthquake with only minor damage. The Northridge quake occurred at 4:30 a.m. on January 17, 1994. It was a 6.7 magnitude."

The video showed the test, commentary from Sun and UCSD personnel, and the aftermath of the simulated quake. Blackbox continued to function, but there were a few things that came loose or were damaged inside the datacenter during the test.

The open approach Sun took with recording and releasing the video reflects an acknowledgment of the power of social media. Anyone can watch the video and see the results, rather than just taking a Sun rep’s word about how the test proceeded.

Plus not everyone is going to go to the effort of having their hardware subjected to an earthquake. It’s a clever bit of marketing Sun has produced for the Blackbox.

We would be criminally remiss if we did not take you back to November 2005, where what was very likely a Project Blackbox prototype had been spotted at Google’s headquarters, and duly passed along to tech pundit Robert X. Cringely.

He had connected the mysterious and off-limits portable datacenter as something Google could have trucked to and linked in to the various points where the company could connect the datacenters to the dark fiber Google has purchased in substantial quantities.

We suggested one potential use for such datacenters would be to support video advertising by dropping them near peering points all over the US. To wit:

Then the story kind of faded away amid chatter about GoogleNet, Ajax-powered office productivity suites, and even Google Cubes populating mailboxes like so many AOL CDs. Almost a year passes.

Now, Dean Takahashi at the Mercury News has dished the early peek at Sun’s Blackbox, which will reportedly debut today. They won’t be available until the middle of 2007, but look at what website/recent Google purchase received a mention from a Sun rep:

Google and Sun have had a long-standing friendly relationship, and Sun envisions other types of usage for their Blackbox. But considering Sun’s economic doldrums, is it unreasonable to think that Sun undertook Project Blackbox with a potential sale to Google in mind?

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.