The Ice Cube Air is also highly modular. SGI is offering three models, the smallest of which is 8 feet long, or big enough for four server racks, and starts at $99,000 without the IT equipment. Customers can put four of the modules together for a capacity of 16 racks.

"Our intent is to make it easier to buy a modular data center, by offering a product that lets customers start small and has that expandability quotient,"

The Ice Cube Air draws in outside air for cooling, widely seen as the most energy-efficient method. If the climate is too warm to use fresh-air cooling year round, SGI will install evaporative or direct expansion cooling systems for backup, and there's a traditional chiller option for customers that want it.

But SGI believes fresh-air cooling can be used in all climates at least part of the time. "We believe air cooling is a solution that can be used everywhere. It won't work every day everywhere, or every hour of the day everywhere, and that's why we offer backup cooling systems as well," said Bill Mannel, SGI vice president of product marketing.

An Ice Cube Air cooled by fresh air only has a PUE, or Power Usage Effectiveness, of 1.06, he said. PUE is a ratio of the total power going into a data center against the amount that actually reaches the servers, as opposed to being used for cooling systems, for example. Most traditional data centers have PUEs of 2.0 or higher.