HP launches datacentre construction service

HP has entered the datacentre construction market, rounding out its line-up of design and project-management services for datacentre builds.

The HP Critical Facilities Implementation Service, officially launched on Tuesday, means the company can now offer end-to-end datacentre assembly, from initial design to getting the bricks laid and managing the facility. It is targeting all sizes of datacentre, from the 500 square-foot server room to dedicated new-build sites of more than 20,000 square feet.

HP has entered the datacentre construction market, following on from projects such as its PodWorks factory (above). Photo credit: HP

"What we've faced in the last years in the critical facilities arena is that the demand for design and build is growing," Ivan Jascur, HP's critical facilities services portfolio lead for Europe, told ZDNet UK on Wednesday.

HP is betting on its "global reach and experience of design, together with how we address IT needs from a facility point of view" to sell into this demand, he added.

Jascur said HP will be able to design facilities down to a power usage effectiveness (PUE) rating of between 1.1 and 1.2, but it all depends on the needs of the client and the local climate.

PUE expresses the relationship between the total power for the facility and the power that goes into the core IT equipment. A PUE of 1.2 means that for every unit of power spent on core IT equipment, an additional 0.2 units is spent on the supporting infrastructure.

"The goal is to extend our portfolio with design build," Jascur noted.

HP has been using a range of strategies to build up its datacentre business for a while. The construction launch moves its Converged Infrastructure suite of basic datacentre hardware into bigger projects. Other strategies include the HP PodWorks datacentre factory, which sees the company ship containerised performance optimised datacentres (Pods) to customers around the world, plus a range of packages to entice enterprises into its own datacentres by using its cloud services.