HP Debuts New Portable Container Datacentre

Hewlett Packard has unveiled a new edition of its portable datacentre, which is based on a standard 20-foot shipping container and is just half the size of its original model.

The company is pitching its hopes on the fact that entry price of the small-sized of the datacentre would augment its adoption in the small and medium-sized companies.

In addition, the small size would further make it easier to ship the machine, as rugged tracks in some part of the world make it difficult to ship the bulky 100,000-pound fully loaded 40-foot shipping container.

Dubbed as “Performance Optimised Datacenter”, or simply “POD”, the solution would offer businesses a more compact way to increase their storage capacity and compute power quickly, without actually necessitating pouring extra sum in new datacentre or upgrading the capabilities of the existing one.

The new 20-foot containerised datacentre can accommodate 10 racks of compute gear, as against 22 racks for the 40-foot version.  The first iteration of the datacenter was released somewhere in the mid of the year 2008, following other companies, such as Sun Microsystems, now a part of Oracle.

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Base pricing for the 20-foot container, without any added IT equipments, is fixed at $60,000, while list base price for its 40-foot cousin is $1.2 million for the high density POD and $1 million for the low density POD, according to Jean Brandau, product manager for POD at HP.