BANGALORE, INDIA: Chris Clifford, director, Verb DC, in an interview with CIOL talks about the the 20-foot HP POD deployed at its Wyong DC Centre on the NSW Central Coast of Australia, the first such in APAC.

CIOL: Why did Verb IT go for HP POD and not others?

Chris Clifford: We conducted reviews as well as a heuristic assessment of options implemented internationally and were satisfied with the implementation team and service standards around ITIL v3.0 (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) established with HP. Moreover, we were also satisfied with HP power options, of 27kw per rack, maintenance agreement, ability to support many hardware vendors and PUE rating (1.25).

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CIOL: How many clients have you acquired so far for the POD? How many more such PODs are you planning for?

Chris: We have over 80 SMB clients at Verb IT to whom we provide managed services and many have already become direct customers of Verb Data Centre. There are already three VARs (value-added resellers) coming on board to offer hosted services and cloud services.

Verb DC has future PODs planned, and will be adding a second when we reach 60-70 percent capacity on the first POD. We are well on our way.

CIOL: How will POD benefit the managed services and storage industries out there?

Chris: Hosting and managed services are increasing. We see mail, storage, CRM and intranet/document management systems showing huge growth in Australia, and virtualised private cloud is how this will be achieved.

The biggest advantage is the ability to support large volumes of high density space. We can support petabytes of storage in one rack alone.

We can also enable a sovereign private cloud base with the ability to integrate with other public cloud services. 

CIOL: What are the current challenges in the market? How will POD address it?

Chris: There are five key challenges facing data centres and customers.

Power (increasing cost), data access (need for QoS based service to offer virtualised services), high density (ability to support high density infrastructure), sustainability reduced carbon emissions and mandates that enterprise customers have over the next three years, and cost effective growth (opex options, not constant large capex).

Addressing the Challenges with the POD:
Power: POD architecture supports 27kw and 150 physical servers per rack.

Data: Carrier neutrality - Optus/Telstra, MPLS, QoS - is providing maximum 24 milliseconds latency to Sydney metro.

High Density: Blade server technology, ability to support this in POD architecture, Virtualisation 2.0 around efficiency and management can be achieved in the POD.

Sustainability: PUE ratings at 1.25 is clearly reducing power services by up to 60 percent.

Growth: Deployment of a POD in 14 weeks provide ability to roll-out and then offer opex to direct customers and VARs.

CIOL: Do you see a scope for POD in Indian market?

Chris: Yes, I actually see it an excellent alternative to costly bricks and mortar commercial data centres to assist with power reductions, support high storage and data loads, for high performance computing and specialised projects, and for transitional and overflow demand.