HP Rolls Out Its POD Mobile Data Center at Gartner Expo

While Hewlett-Packard first began talking about the POD mobile data center in July, the company officially rolled out the container at the 2008 Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in October.

A fully loaded HP POD container measures 8 by 40 feet and can hold 3,520 blade servers or a total of 12,000 hard disk drives. (Photo: eWEEK)

Another view of the container from the outside. HP says it can have a fully loaded container shipped to a customer in six weeks. (Photo: eWEEK)

A view from inside the POD. At the show, HP took out some of the 50U cabinets to allow people to walk inside. (Photo: eWEEK)

When it’s fully loaded, the HP POD will circulate hot air through the ceiling, chill it and then redistribute the air in the cold aisle to help cool the hardware. (Photo: eWEEK)

A view of the 2U servers that HP included in the POD demonstration at the Gartner conference. In this case, each 2U system holds four compute nodes. (Photo: eWEEK)

In the back of the server rows, HP included a hot aisle. The air from this aisle is then circulated through the ceiling, chilled and deposited in the cold aisle. (Photo: eWEEK)

HP developed its own cooling system for the POD, which helps circulate the hot air from one side and redeposit it as cool air on the other side. Here, HP shows one of the blowers that brings the cool air into the aisle. (Photo: eWEEK)