HP pitches portable data centre to provincial companies

Jeff Healey. Photo / Supplied

Provincial businesses with lots of data to store are being urged to pool their computing needs and buy shares in a shipping container - a very high-tech shipping container.

The suggestion comes from Hewlett-Packard, which has begun touting a portable data centre housed in a metal shipping container.

The company has yet to make a New Zealand sale of its Performance-Optimised Datacentre, or POD, but said it has had strong interest in the concept, including from groups of businesses in towns and cities outside the main centres.

PODs cost several hundred thousand dollars, with the price of an individual unit dependent on the exact server and storage technology requirements specified by the buyer.

They are built in 6m- and 12m-long containers. HP said each POD could provide computing capacity equivalent to a 370sq m data centre.

Jeff Healey, the company's country manager for its enterprise storage, servers and networking business, said many New Zealand organisations were facing the issue of running data centres that were not designed for today's "high-density" computing and storage requirements.

While physical space to place more servers might not be a problem, efficiently powering and cooling the equipment could be.

"The challenges we've got in New Zealand are leaning people towards considering models like this," said Healey. Building a new data centre could take more than a year, whereas HP was promising to deliver its PODs in six weeks.

Other IT companies, including Sun Microsystems, had previously sold data centres in portable container form, but Healey said HP's version was technologically superior because the company had spent more time developing the concept.

He said recent tight economic conditions had forced companies to rethink their capital expenditure plans, including how much they spent on computing resources and disaster recovery (DR) measure, which included having access to back-up computing facilities and data.

"A lot of organisations in the smaller geographies where there isn't a major data centre are considering clubbing together to jointly buy a DR facility using the containerised data centres," he said.

"We've had a number of those discussions."

Healey said the advanced technology of the POD even extended to the paint used to coat the outside of the container, which was the same type of highly-durable, heat-reflective paint used on space stations and the Space Shuttle's booster rockets.

"It's not just a shipping container that's been spray-painted and had a few racks put inside it. A lot's gone into the design and development."