IT manufacturer Hewlett-Packard (www.hp.com) is starting to ship its new Performance Optimized Data Center, which the company hopes will compete against similar high-density, mobile containers from lead competitors such as IBM, Sun, Microsoft and Dell.

First announced in July, HP says its Performance Optimized Data Center (www.hp.com/products/pod) will help businesses meet the demands of technology growth in the data center and the challenges of rising energy costs.

The company has already begun shipping orders to customers, with plans to promote the mobile data center around the country. HP first showcased the POD offering this week at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo.

Many competing companies have launched their own containerized data centers in the past couple years. In October 2006, Sun was one of the first companies to offer a containerized data center with its Project Blackbox.

Since then, a handful of companies have announced and launched their own portable data center offerings, including Dell, Microsoft, and IBM.

HP director of infrastructure Steve Cumings said that the mobile data center gives customers an alternative to building out an IT infrastructure or off-site disaster recovery plan, enabling them to boost power to support technology for high-performance computing or Web 2.0 applications.

The new POD offerings can be ready to ship in just six weeks, which is substantially faster than the 12 to 24 months it would take to build out a traditional data center, added Cumings.

Although HP currently has at least one customer order for POD, along with several of prospective orders, Cumings said that HP does not anticipate it will sell larger volumes of POD offerings, nor does the company expect these offerings will replace traditional data centers.

The POD also gives HP the ability to introduce new services in support of the offering, such as consulting work, for companies seeking an optimal location for the container. Additionally, the POD can support other IT hardware, which in turn can be supported and serviced by HP's engineering team.

During this week's Gartner demonstration, HP showcased a nearly full container that supported 50U, 87.5" cabinets that contained 2U, 3.5" servers that were each comprised of four compute nodes.

A complete 8-foot-by-40-foot POD container can hold up to 3,520 servers or 12,000 hard disk drives in total, providing 12TB of data storage. The HP POD includes the company's Insight Manager or OpenView to help control the servers.

Other features include POD's alternative hot and cold aisles for optimized heating and cooling, allowing hot air from one side to be distributed through the ceiling heat exchange, cooled and redistributed as cold air to the other side.

HP POD also offers a greater power density ratio than a traditional facility, using 1,800 watts per square foot instead of the 250 to 300 watts per square foot used in a traditional enterprise facility.

Earlier this week, HP topped the "Green Data Center" Vendor Matrix, an analytical tool developed by ABI Research as a clear rating of vendor position in specific markets.

Source:WEB HOST