vinf.net pointed out a video clip from GigaOm.tv which gives an insight to the capabilities and design behind HP’s Performance-Optimized Data Center or POD for short.

The HP POD is basically a shipping container containing a row of high density servers, power and cooling.  The POD contains 50U racks which if used with HP’s 10U C7000 blade chassis’ fully populated with half-height blades such as the BL460c would provide 160 servers per rack and up to 3,500 servers per POD.

To take this a step further if each blade was running a virtualisation product such as VMware ESX or Microsoft’s Hyper-V and we assume that each blade was capable of running 25 VM’s (which in my experience, on average is quite a conservative estimate) then a fully populated POD could potentially house 87,500 servers.  Of course this isn’t a realistic figure at all, as this doesn’t take into account the space required for SAN storage, network switching, physical management servers, etc. 

But even using a 50% reduced figure of 1,750 servers per POD that would still equate to 43,750 virtualised servers per POD.  Not bad at all.

Anyway, back to reality, the POD is designed to address issues commonly experienced by companies and their traditional data centers: space, power and cooling.

Check out the video for more details.  It is worth pointing out that there are POD-like offerings from another key players in the industry:

Sun’s Modular Datacenter

Dell has a container type datacenter is the works – see here for more details.

IBM’s Portable Modular Data Center (PMDC)