HP Launches Data Center Containers With 12-Week Delivery Time
HP Performance Optimized Data Centers (PODs) promise to solve looming data center cost, space and power consumption issues by packaging all the infrastructure needed to run a business in a neatly packaged container form. HP says PODs offer 75 percent savings on data center construction right off the bat.
The first model, HP POD 240a, uses up to 95 percent less energy than traditional data centers, offering Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) as low as 1.05. HP says traditional data centers have an average PUE of around 2.0. HP POD 240a also includes the equivalent of 10,000 square feet of data center space, said Paul Miller, vice president of Solutions and Strategic Alliances for HP's Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking division (ESSN), in an interview prior to the opening of HP Discover 2011 in Las Vegas.
HP's POD 240a holds (44) 50U industry-standard racks, 2,200U of rack space, and up to 24,000 large form factor hard drives over 7,000 computing nodes. It also houses in excess of 2,200U of industry-standard servers with 2.3 MW power capacity and average rack densities up to 44 kW, and is available in redundant or non-redundant configurations.
Rounding out the package is HP's integrated power and cooling, as well as security, fire suppression and HP's Server Automation 9.1 monitoring and management software.
As with other modular data center architecture, the benefits of HP PODs include quick provisioning and the ability for organizations to scale up as needed. Miller says PODs are just a part of HP's overall data center vision, filling a gap for customers that seek agility in their day to day IT operations.
In HP's view of the future, "some data centers will be built with bricks-and-mortar, and others will be built in HP's factory and bring customers savings in the form of lower building costs and ongoing maintenance," said Miller.