HP launches prefab data centre | | 2008-07-16 | | HP has announced plans for a containerized portable data centre which will allow data facilities to increase their computing power without the expense and time required to build new infrastructure, as well as having a role in disaster recovery.
The Performance Optimized Data Center (POD) will consist of a forty foot shipping container with servers and storage gear preinstalled. Customers only need plug in a cooling supply, power supply and a network connection, and the mini data centres are ready to go. A smaller twenty foot version will also be available.
The hardware will comprise 22 50U racks that can support up to 3,500 compute nodes, or 12,000 large form-factor hard drives for a total 12 petabytes of storage. The servers will be accessible from the front of the rack and cooled with HP modular cooling system components using chilled water.
Unlike similar products from Sun, Rackable Systems and IBM, HP will fit the POD with servers from any manufacturer. "Customers don’t want a container that only supports HP equipment. Customers want to be able to mimic their own [heterogeneous] data centers, so we’ve designed the POD to support any vendor’s hardware." said Steve Cummings, the director of scalable computing infrastructure at HP.
The POD will be available in the U.S. by the end of the third quarter and worldwide a few months after that. Pricing has yet to be announced.
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