Find yourself in the need of a portable data center?  Now I am not talking about a mobile home with a few racks inside of it.  HP’s latest release is a new Performance Optimized Data Center, or otherwise referred to as POD.   Think of it as a shipping container filled with everything you would need for a data center.

This is what Steve Cumings, the director of Infrastructure for HP had to say in an interview with eWeek.com:

“Customers are looking to expand their data center footprint with additional capacity much faster than adding a traditional brick and mortar data center.  It can take 12 to 24 months to build out one of these traditional data centers and in the case of the POD, we can have one ready to ship in just about six weeks.”

So what about the stats?

A complete 8-foot-by-40-foot POD container can hold up to 3,520 servers or 12,000 hard disk drives in total, providing 12TB of data storage. The POD also has a unique cooling system too.  It includes hot and cold aisles for optimized heating and cooling, allowing hot air from one side to be distributed through the ceiling heat exchange, cooled and redistributed as cold air to the other side.  So the POD itself is like one big personal computer in its own right.

HP hopes will compete against similar high-density, mobile container offerings from IBM, Sun Microsystems and others.   With this juggernaut, I think they stand a pretty good chance.