IDG News Service — Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) thinks it can build data centers faster and more cheaply by using standard, pre-built components that are assembled on site in a "Lego-like" fashion.

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Its Flexible Data Center, announced Tuesday, consists of four large data center halls, or quadrants, that are built around an operations building in the center. It's constructed from prefabricated sheet metal parts, and the quadrants, each about 6,000 square feet, can be added one at a time as a company's capacity needs increase.

It's a big departure from traditional brick and mortar data centers, which are usually designed on a custom basis and take more than a year to build. Using standard designs and factory-built components, HP says it can reduce construction costs by a half and get a new data center up and running in four to six months.

"We came up with a Lego-like concept, an industrialized approach to data center design," said Kfir Godrich, a CTO in HP's Technology Service group. The data centers are also highly energy efficient, he said.

HP came up with the idea after talking with some of its large customers. Many of them have data centers that are low on capacity, but they but are unwilling -- or unable -- to foot the bill for a new facility, especially when that involves having to forecast what their capacity needs will be a decade or more into the future.

A prefab structure can help solve that problem, allowing companies to start small and add new modules as their demand for compute power increases, said Michael Qualley, a senior vice president with IT consulting company Forsythe Solutions Group.

They won't be suitable for all types of applications, he said, but are a good fit for companies building highly virtualized environments -- big farms of x86 servers like those used by cloud service providers such as Amazon Web Services, or by corporations building private clouds to deliver services like virtual desktops.

HP also listed search providers, data center collocation companies, and financial services firms as potential targets. It hasn't named any customers yet, but Wells Fargo (WFC) was quoted in HP's press release calling Flexible Data Center "a promising new approach."

HP isn't adhering to the Uptime Institute's tiering system, Godrich said, which companies use to figure out if design has sufficient redundancy and reliability to meet their applications' needs. "With the enterprise cloud, we don't think most applications are going to be high-availability, critical applications," he said.

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