HP on Tuesday unveiled a 20-foot version of its Performance-Optimized Datacenter, or POD — a trailer-sized container with a datacentre inside.
In 2008, HP introduced a 40-foot version of the containerised datacentre that was initially designed for 'scale out' customers such as Web 2.0 companies and cloud-computing vendors. However, the concept has caught on among enterprises in vertical markets such as oil and gas, government and financial services.
The containerised datacentre movement has a bevy of providers, including IBM, Rackable, Sun, Verari Systems and HP.
Some companies are embracing pod architecture: a big hollow building that holds a series of these datacentre containers linked together. With that architecture, datacentre pods can be swapped out continually to enhance the performance of a facility.
For more on this story, see HP rolls out 20-foot datacenter pod on ZDNet.com.