HP 'PODs' offer data centre in a box

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As HP continued to push its ideal of a “converged infrastructure” today, the company revealed an offering with data centres straight from the assembly line.

Known as HP “PODs,”or Performance Optimised Data Centres, the launch enables customers to order a modular data centre in a container, delivered to their business and ready to plug in.

The two new factories producing the PODs – or the POD-Works – can make up to 15,000 servers a day – or one every 12 seconds – and will help businesses cut the delivery time of a full infrastructure to as little as six weeks.

“We see ourselves as the Henry Ford of the computer industry,” said Dave Donatelli, executive vice president and general manager of HP Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking.

The containers can live within a current data centre or warehouse, but can also just be put on stilts outside or used as a mobile data centre to move around, he claimed.

There are currently only two POD-Works making the data centre boxes, one in the US and one in Europe, but Mark Potter, senior vice president and general manager of Industry Standard Servers, said these could supply companies in all regions.

PODs are already shipping but HP was too shy to give us actual numbers or predictions of how many it thinks it will sell.

The idea of a data centre in a box might sound like the ultimate converged infrastructure, but Donatelli ensured the audience HP had further to go.

“In the technology industry, we are never done [and] we are always looking for more solutions,” he concluded. “We have lots more technology coming out and we will always look to bring new innovations out there.”

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