July 16, 2008 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- It looks like HP (hp.com), an entity that places itself among the largest IT companies worldwide, will soon be joining the ranks of its fellow IT vendors after announcing on Wednesday that it is launching its own a container-based data center offering.
Set to be released in the US by the end of the third quarter, and worldwide a few months after that, HP's Performance Optimized Data Center (hp.com/products/pod), or HP POD, is being launched to help businesses keep pace with the demands of technology growth in the data center and the challenges of rising energy costs, says the company.
HP has a video announcing its new containerized data center offering as well.
Built within a 40-foot shipping container and delivering the equivalent of over 4,000 square feet of "typical" data center space, HP says these PODs support a wide variety of HP and third-party technology and provide customers with more density than competitive offerings by supporting more than 3,500 compute nodes, or 12,000 large-form-factor hard drives.
A photograph of the new HP POD, taken from the company's website.
HP PODs are built to order and delivered through HP Factory Express, HP's customization, configuration and integration services organization. HP POD Infrastructure Services include assessment, preparation and deployment services, as well as data center design and planning through EYP Mission Critical Facilities, a company of HP.
"Customers have more flexibility to balance their capital expenditures and operating expenses while quickly and seamlessly meeting their needs for additional capacity with HP PODs," says Christine Martino, VP and general manager, scalable computing and infrastructure organization, HP. "HP's innovative POD approach allows customers to deploy world-class, scalable, highly power-efficient data center resources quickly and ships in just six weeks."
With this new project in development, HP will join such other major hardware vendors as Sun Microsystems, Rackable Systems and Dell that already have containerized data centers. Sun first announced its "Project Blackbox" offering in October 2006.
The shipping container data centers are believed to appeal to customers who are running out of space in their current data centers, providing backup computing gear for disaster recovery services or setting up operations in remote locations.
Microsoft recently sparked new interest in container-based computing ideas when it announced it would be putting roughly 200 containers into a data center.
