BANGALORE, INDIA: Stephen Bovis, VP and GM, Industry Standard Servers, Hewlett-Packard Asia Pacific and Japan in an interview with CIOL.

CIOL: HP is one of the last to enter the POD (Performance optimised data centre or containerised data centre) segment? So how do you see yourself picking up in the race?

Stephen Bovis: Since our entry in 2008, we have made significant progress in this space. We believe there’s a big market opportunity out there and HP is in a good position to deliver on the value and business benefits to our customers.

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Over the past year, HP has led the container market in providing an open standards design that allows for installation of many brands of IT equipment with the flexibility for customers to design their configuration to best suit their requirements – with no proprietary hardware required.

CIOL: Despite its presence in the market for over a couple of years, PODs haven't really picked up. Why?

Stephen: As with many new technologies and concepts introduced before its time, there is often a lag time to widen market acceptance.

There are a couple of factors we have to consider. Firstly, scale-out infrastructure environments such as the POD that caters to niche customers that operate high performance computing, Web 2.0 and cloud computing environments.

These are customers who require massive compute power to process large content-rich data and have architectures running on hundred to thousands or tens of thousands of nodes and cannot support a large number of systems.

Secondly, there must be demand as well as the network and power infrastructure to support the architecture.

CIOL: So do you see a change in this trend now? Is the adoption picking up? Why?

Stephen: Yes. Businesses are faced with challenges to increase capacity to meet higher levels of SLAs and to offer new services to grow their share-of-wallet, and often with minimal increase of capital and operating budget.

At the same time, most traditional data centres are not equipped to handle higher levels of power efficiencies to support more IT equipment.

The confluence of these two trends in business IT creates an excellent opportunity for POD as a viable business and technology solution to help organizations to get the most from their IT budgets.