June 22 (Bloomberg) -- When Richard Mount needed more processing power for Stanford University's particle accelerator, he didn't have room in his four-story building for a bunch of new computers. So he put them in the parking lot.

Sun Microsystems Inc. will deliver a 20-foot (6.1-meter) shipping container packed with 252 servers next week to crunch data for physicists, betting a wave of customers follow suit as Internet companies look for quicker, cheaper ways to grow.

``It's the fastest way we can house computers,'' said Mount, director of scientific computing at Stanford's Linear Accelerator Center, which studies subatomic particles for the U.S. Energy Department. ``We can't expand fast enough.''

Stanford is Sun's first customer for Project Blackbox, a steel container full of computers that can go anywhere with power, water and a network connection. It's a response to an industrywide effort to add capacity and lower energy use that has titans Sun and Microsoft Corp. and small rivals such as Rackable Systems Inc. looking for creative ways to meet demand.

Google Inc., Yahoo! Inc. and Microsoft invest hundreds of millions of dollars in data centers to support services such as online video that eat up network capacity. Sun says it can cut power needs by 20 percent with the container setup and touts it as an easy way to install computers where they're cheapest to run -- be that in a parking lot or next to a hydroelectric dam.

``There's a pretty compelling economic argument,'' said George Hamilton, a research director at Yankee Group Research Inc. in Boston.

Electricity Bill

The data centers face several hurdles. The spot chosen has to be able to handle the power requirements, and companies need to assess whether they are cheaper over time than dedicated buildings, Hamilton said. Another concern is preventing thieves from just towing the boxes away, said Jeffrey Hewitt, an analyst at Gartner Inc. in San Jose, California.

Still, businesses are now considering more options to cut power costs as the bills skyrocket. Companies led by Google and Intel Corp. on June 12 unveiled a plan to save $5.5 billion in energy costs yearly by using more energy-saving equipment.

The electricity bill for operating all the servers in the U.S. doubled between 2000 and 2005, to $2.7 billion, said Jonathan Koomey, a consulting professor at Stanford. Servers account for 1.2 percent of all U.S. energy consumption, or about the same amount used by all color televisions.

Sun, the fourth-largest server maker, in March planted Blackbox in New York's Grand Central Terminal so commuters could take a look. Chief Executive Officer Jonathan Schwartz is relying on products such as Blackbox to keep Sun profitable after emerging from five years of losses.

Twenty Customers

Blackbox's cooling system cuts energy consumption by 20 percent, said Darlene Yaplee, a vice president at Santa Clara, California-based Sun. The product attracted customers looking for a temporary option while constructing a larger, permanent data center, and those who want Blackboxes instead of buildings.

Sun charges $500 for the bare box. A container with computers starts at about $500,000. The company has about 20 customers that agreed to try Blackbox before it goes on sale next month.

Stanford's Blackbox will sit on a concrete platform next to a 4-megawatt power supply, enough power for a town of 2,500 people. Mount couldn't put more computers in the building without overhauling its wiring.

``Everyone is facing a power crunch and a heat crunch,'' said Mount.

Efforts

Rackable Systems, based in Fremont, California, sells a rival product called Concentro, which houses as many as 1,200 servers in a 40-foot container. It costs $3 million for a typical configuration. The company, whose stock has fallen 65 percent in the past year, said in March it sold its first box to an unnamed Internet company.

Shares of Sun fell 5 cents to $5.08 at 4 p.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market trading, and have risen 20 percent in the past year. Rackable fell 15 cents to $12.27.

The portable data centers are part of a wider effort among Internet companies to add network capacity. Microsoft and Yahoo are constructing new data centers in Quincy, Washington, to tap local sources of cheap power. In November Yahoo also opened a center in Wenatchee, 30 miles from Quincy.

Google is building farther south along the Columbia River in The Dalles, Oregon. The locations, along with the design of the buildings and their electrical, cooling and computing equipment, are closely guarded secrets.

Exploring Possibilities

``These are all things that we're looking at,'' Yahoo co- founder David Filo said in an interview last month. ``We are exploring with different vendors different possibilities.''

At Microsoft, researcher James Hamilton is trying to persuade executives to use mobile data centers to curb power and maintenance bills. The company hasn't decided whether it will adopt the idea, he said.

``This is the right way for the industry to be going,'' said Hamilton, an architect working on Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft's Internet services.

Google experiments all the time with new data center designs to make computers run more efficiently, co-founder Sergey Brin said in an interview last month.

``I haven't seen too many ideas that we haven't tried or at least contemplated,'' he said.

To contact the reporters on this story: Jonathan Thaw in San Francisco at jthaw@bloomberg.net; Dina Bass in Seattle at dbass2@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: June 22, 2007 16:13 EDT