A Data Center-in-a-Box

HP's Performance-Optimized Data center, or POD, will be available in the U.S. by the end of the third quarter and worldwide a few months after that, the company said last month. Sun Microsystems, Rackable Systems and IBM also sell similar products.

It sounds like a gimmick, but proponents say the portable data centers can solve real problems. They are customized 20-foot or 40-foot shipping containers that vendors fill with servers and storage gear before shipping them out. Customers plug in a cooling supply, a power supply and a network connection, and the mini-data centers are ready to use.

The containers provide a way for resource-constrained facilities to add compute power without having to build a new data center, which is expensive and takes a year or more. They can also be used for disaster recovery, by setting one up on the grounds of a satellite office, for example.

And powerful rack-mount servers, which generate a lot of heat, can be packed more densely in a container because the temperature can be managed more closely in the closed environment.

The HP POD will accommodate 1,800 watts per square foot, compared with about 250 watts per square foot in a normal data center, said Steve Cumings, director of infrastructure with HP's Scalable Computing and Infrastructure group. HP's 40-foot POD will contain 22 50U server racks and be able to house up to 1,100 1U servers or 12,000 large form-factor hard drives, for a total 12 petabytes of storage, Cumings said. (Server racks vary in height; U is the designated standard unit of measure for server-rack height, equal to 1.75 inches.) Customers will be able to put other vendors' equipment in the POD, and HP will install and configure the third-party gear alongside its own.

Sales this year will be "very low," Cumings acknowledged, but demand is expected to increase next year. "These are a great solution for some things, but they are a complement to traditional data centers. It's not that we expect everyone to suddenly flip over to using containers," Cumings said.

HP hasn't announced pricing. Container products from other vendors start from a few hundred thousand dollars and can run into the millions.

The container concept is still new, and critics see potential flaws. Some worry about security, although vendors say the boxes are hard to break into and can be housed on private lots. Others worry about the reliability of having a single power or network connection for such a dense load of equipment. There are also mundane issues, like not being able to open a container to service it in heavy rain, unless it's covered up.