BANGALORE, INDIA: The otherwise election and national broadband network (NBN) fervor struck Australia saw a different kind of news making into its headlines when later last week Hewlett and Packard (HP) announced the installation of its 20 foot performance optimised data centre, also called POD in short.

Verb IT, an Australian-based managed service provider, deployed the HP POD at its DC site at Wyong, on the NSW Central Coast of Australia.

The contract HP and Triforce Australia signed with Verb IT is of A $ 5 million worth.

Stephen Bovis, VP and GM, industry standards servers, HP APJ, says: "The POD can be built in 12-14 weeks and comes with up to 45 percent less brick and mortar. Built on converged infrastructure the POD can address the challenges such as power, cooling, space and capacity limiting IT etc."

The $600,000 worth (not inclusive of the IT equipment inside) POD is the first operational HP 20 foot containerized data centre solution in Asia Pacific.

Although the concept hasn't really taken off in this part of the world, such as the Indian sub continent, (in fact as per reports it hasn't really picked up in world over either) Bovis doesn't see any reason why it should not come to India.

He will be soon in India charting out the possibilities for the POD as he sees the same kind of situation and challenges in terms of power and space here similar to the rest of the markets.

The Australian-based managed service provider seems to have already clinched over A $1 million-worth contract due to the rapid deployment of the solution. The facility, which can weigh up to 26-30 tonnes when fully equipped, will be fully operational by the first week of September.

HP POD
HP, who launched  its 20 foot POD in November 2009, announced the general availability of this half the size 40-foot data centre in a box concept in February 2010. With this 20 foot POD, developed in partnership with Triforce, HP joined the likes of IBM, Rackable, Sun (now a part of Oracle), and Verrari.

HP POD features HP blade servers, tape library back up and SAN storage. The system has an emergency switch, which can completely shut down the system in case of an emergency.

Standard 19-inch racks are fitted inside the POD and can house any type of network, computing and storage systems, not just HP equipment. Each rack can house up to five HP blade chassis.

The facility is equipped with:
Onsite generator: A diesel generator which can support the POD during black out.
Storage well: Which supplies water to the POD.
UPS Room: Where the biometrics are kept.
NOC Room: Where four-five people work to provide support to its 25 locations across the country. 

Features:
Supports over 1,500 compute nodes.
Average power density is 27 KW per rack, maximum density is 34 kW.
The POD can support up to 100 physical servers per rack.
There are ten 50-unit racks in the 20 foot POD.
Can support Telstra/Optus, MPLS, QoS etc.
Supports Blade severs.
Can operate at a PUE (power usage effectiveness) rate of 1.25.
3000-4000 on power device on one single device.
Supports third-party technologies, besides the vendor’s own gear.
Pay-as-you-grow.