In the summer of 2008, Hewlett Packard launched a 40-foot, 22 rack portable data center that sold for $1.2 million dollars, something that was beyond the reach of most enterprise clients.
HP is back again with a smaller scale portable data center or Performance Optimized Data Center (POD). The new data center is half the price ($600,000) and half the size (20-feet) of its big brother. The fully enclosed POD comes with 10 50u racks, air, water and power hookups and can house up to 5,000 large form factor hard drives or 1,500 computing nodes. Each POD is made to order with delivery occurring about six weeks after HP receives a purchase order.
POD technology is being targeted towards government agencies, institutions and large enterprises that would benefit from using portable data centers that are linked together. The advantage of this architecture is scalability as PODs could be added or swapped out as needed to improve an organizations computing performance.
It should also be noted that the $600,000 HP price tag only covers the POD itself. All network and server hardware as well software and other related IT costs would be additional and above and beyond the initial layout.
Gadget
News RSS
Email