ORLANDO, Fla.
– Hewlett-Packard is beginning to roll out its new mobile data center called
the POD or Performance Optimized Data Center, which the IT
giant hopes will compete against similar high-density, mobile container offerings from IBM,
Sun
Microsystems and others.
HP
first announced the POD in July, but the company is now beginning to ship orders
to customers and is planning to take the mobile data center on a tour. The
first stop of this debut tour took place at the Gartner
Symposium/ITxpo here.
Steve Cumings, the director of
Infrastructure for HP, said that this type of high-density mobile data center
offers customers a different choice when it comes to building out an IT
infrastructure or when considering an off-site disaster recovery plan.
Specifically, these data centers allow users
to add more compute power faster to support technology for high-performance
computing (HPC) or Web 2.0 applications.
“Customers are looking to expand their data
center footprint with additional capacity much faster than adding a traditional
brick and mortar data center,” Cumings told eWEEK on Oct. 15. “It can take 12
to 24 months to build out one of these traditional data centers and in the case
of the POD, we can have one ready to ship in just about six weeks.”
IBM
offered a similar scenario when it rolled out its own mobile data center or
the Portable Modular Data Center in June.
HP does not expect to sell larger volumes of these data
centers, nor does the company expect that these data centers will ever replace
more traditional facilities. However, Cumings said HP has at least one customer
taking an order right now – he declined to name the specific company – and
others are also interested.
The POD is also a way for HP
to build out its IT services division.
HP can set up a POD and offer a number of extras, such as
consulting work, for companies looking for the optimal location to place the container
in order to take advantage of space and access to power. The POD is also
flexible enough to support other IT hardware, which HP and its engineers can
then support and service.
At the Gartner show, HP showed off a nearly full container
that supported 50U (87.5-inch) cabinets that were packed with 2U (3.5-inch)
servers that were each made up of four compute nodes. A complete 8-foot-by-40-foot POD container can support up to 3,520 blade
servers or a total of 12,000 hard disk drives that offer 12TB of data storage. An
HP POD also comes equipped with HP’s Insight Manager or OpenView to help manage
the servers.
Click here to view images of HP’s P.O.D. Mobile Data Center.
The POD is also set up with alternative hot and cold aisles
for optimized heating and cooling. The hot air from one side is sucked up
through the ceiling heat exchange, chilled and returned as cold air to the other
side.
Finally, Cumings said the mobile data center offers a
significant power density ratio compared to a traditional facility. In the POD,
HP ensured that container uses 1,800 watts per square foot compared to the 250
to 300 watts per square foot typically seen in an enterprise data center.
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