Hewlett-Packard says its prefabricated Flexible Data Center design will give businesses greater flexibility in building their IT infrastructure facilities and cut construction costs by more than half.
Hewlett-Packard is introducing a modular, prefabricated data center design
that officials say will give businesses more options and significantly drive
down the costs of building a new facility.
HP on July 27 unveiled its Flexible
Data Center
concept, which has what officials call a "butterfly" design. In the
center is a rectangular central core building that houses administrative
offices, staff meeting rooms, networking and security, and shipping and
receiving.
The core can have up to four prefabricated quadrants, up to
6,000 square feet each, which house the servers. Cooling devices are attached
to the rear of each quadrant, and generators are located to the side. The
design offers up to four cooling technologies and five UPS
configurations.
The goal of the design is not only to reduce the overall cost
of building a new data center, but also to offer businesses a greater level of
flexibility in how to build it, according to Ian Jagger, worldwide marketing
manager for the HP Critical Facilities Services unit. Businesses can add the
quadrants as needed, rather than having to build unneeded capacity into the
initial facility design.
"You're really building this Lego piece by Lego
piece," Jagger said in an interview with eWEEK.
The Flexible Data
Center also reduces the amount of
time needed to build a data center, cutting capital costs while increasing time
to market. In addition, it's a much more energy-efficient design and is easier
on the environment, he said.
HP's Flexible Data
Center program is part of a growing
trend of modular designs. For example, HP and other vendors, including IBM,
Cisco Systems, Dell, SGI and Verari Systems,
offer containerized
data centers that house all the necessary systems and technologies and can
be shipped on the back of a tractor-trailer.
With HP's new design strategy, businesses can cut the costs of
new data centers by more than half, pare their ownership costs over 20 years by
two-thirds and adopt a more measured approach to paying for capacity, Jagger
said.
The demand for new data center space is only growing, he said,
noting that more than 30 of the Fortune 100 companies are HP customers, and
most are looking to build next-generation data centers.
"You can't be a Fortune 100 company without a
next-generation data center," Jagger said. "The question then is, Where
are we going next?"
With HP's Flexible Data
Center approach, businesses install
the prefab central core, and then add as many quadrants as needed to meet capacity
demand. If demand grows later, they can add another quadrant.
Each quadrant can handle up to 800 kilowatts of equipment,
creating a 3.2-megawatt data center that has a life span of 15 years or more.
Jagger said traditional 3.2-megawatt data centers cost about
$18 million per megawatt to build. The Flexible
Data Center
design costs about $8 million per megawatt.
The air cooling also saves money over water cooling, both in
terms of equipment and in power consumption. With the cooling, air enters the building
through sidewalls, runs through the racks and is collected in hot aisle
containment areas, where it then is exhausted through the roof. In addition,
there are no raised floors, saving space and money, he said.
Jagger said many types of companies could benefit from this
approach, such as data center colocation companies, Web-based companies, including
search providers like Google, financial services firms and enterprises with
highly virtualized server environments.
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