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HP POD - HP’s answer to Sun’s Blackbox

July 22nd, 2008 • Related • Filed Under

HP has announced a container-based data center offering similar to Sun’s Project Blackbox/Modular Data Center S20. Called the POD - Performance Optimized Data Center, the mobile data center enables customers to expand their data center capacity in support of their IT and business growth without the need to create a separate physical facilities to accommodate their growing IT needs.

The 40 foot container can house up to 3,500 compute nodes, or 12,000 LFF hard drives. This results in a 4,000-plus square feet equivalent of a typical data center capacity and HP is claiming to ship their POD’s within six weeks of the customer’s order.

“Customers have more flexibility to balance their capital expenditures and operating expenses while quickly and seamlessly meeting their needs for additional capacity with HP PODs,” said Christine Martino, vice president and general manager, Scalable Computing and Infrastructure Organization, HP.

Sun has offered a similar solution since Oct. of 2006. Originally called Project BlackBox it is now sold as the Sun Modular Datacenter S20. However, Sun’s offering is a 20 foot container compared to the HP POD which is a 40 foot container.