Cloud, Web 2.0 to drive POD adoption: HP

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.

Also Read: Source Data Dedupe Suits Virtual Environment

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.

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CIOL: What do you think will drive the traction of PODs?

Stephen: The evolution of cloud computing is causing data to grow at an exponential 2/3 rate due to large content-rich data.

With the growing sophistication of cloud technology, organizations require a massive data engine built on next-generation, dense compute and storage systems that are easy to manage in order to deliver on cloud computing services.

The HP POD benefits organizations with limited space and budget and critical mobility needs with scalable, flexible and secure infrastructures across multiple locations.

HP sees the largest opportunity with customers who simply need additional data centre capacity, because they’ve reached their limits in power and cooling capacity, and/or physical space, as well as for green field data centres going in for the first time, often to support new facilities.

This includes Web 2.0, cloud computing and scale-out customers who continue to need large amounts of extremely power-dense compute or storage to deliver their services.

CIOL: How many of HP's 40 foot PODs (launched in 2008) have been deployed so far?

Stephen: Whilst we are not able to disclose the number of PODs deployed, HP has been successful in deploying 40-ft PODs to major customers in the US and European countries.

CIOL: How many more contracts are in pipeline for the 20 foot POD?

Stephen: We are working with many key customers and prospects in every region on the 20-ft POD and it is no different in APJ Region.

CIOL: Do you see a market for PODs in India?

Stephen: India is a key growth country for HP, and we are seeing a strong interest from Indian customers for POD solutions. This comes as no surprise as many businesses in India are witnessing a rapid growth in information within their organizations.

To support this growth and time to market pressures, they are looking for IT infrastructure that can be rapidly deployed. However, with challenges in availability of real-estate, power, cooling and the right personnel, these could take months to be built.

The POD requires about 20 percent less capex than traditional brick and mortar data centres, and allows businesses to pay-as-you-grow when additional capacity is needed.