Yesterday, Cisco became the latest to jump on the containerised data center band wagon. Joining Sun, Dell, IBM, HP and more focussed suppliers such as Cirrascale, Cisco is the latest to offer commercial customers the opportunity to buy a container full of Cisco UCS kit (or, unusually, competitor kit) and have it deployed and fully operational on-site within three months. Despite the usual talk of deploying these things to disaster areas or siting them temporarily for compute-intensive events like the Olympics or last week’s wedding, the real emphasis still seems to be on extending the capacity of existing data centers. Maybe the real potential of a truly portable data center will only be realised once the container can generate its own power, cool itself, and push data in and out without placing undue strain on flaky local infrastructure? Until then, adding additional capacity in the car park/ parking lot of overloaded data center buildings is certainly a nice — though niche — business to be in.