A new player recently entered the data center container market; incumbent HP added a half-size container to its line of products and IBM (another incumbent) recently touted its own containerized solution through highlighting the vendors that build the infrastructure components inside the box.

The new container vendor is a French company named Bull, which announced its Mobull solution in November.

While sounding optimistic about industry interest they observe, none of the market incumbents DatacenterDynamics interviewed wished to disclose the amount of containerized data center units they had shipped. Judging on several sources’ estimates, the total number of containers shipped per year is currently several hundred.

Using containers to expand capacity of existing data centers that are close to running out or are out of space remains the most popular use among customers that do deploy the solution. Another common use is for quick remote data center deployments (popular with oil and gas companies and the military) and for disaster recovery.

HP goes after APJ regions
Jean Brandau, product marketing manager for HP’s Scalable Computing and Infrastructure business, said the company was stepping up marketing efforts for containers in the Asia Pacific and Japanese regions. Until recently, more sales resources had been focused on EMEA and the Americas.

“In the US, we’re seeing more demand for … the 40-foot models and in other world regions we’re seeing a lot of demand for the smaller size, which mirrors the size of the data centers in the regions.”

Brandau said HP has sold the 20-foot version of its container since its November launch, although would not specify how many units.

IBM container client base diversifies
The size of most orders IBM has received has been between one and three units, IBM Global Services Executive Brian Canney said. The vendor sees such deployment size appropriate for the solution’s purpose.

“We’re not out there promoting 100’s of containers to take the place of a 50,000-square-foot data center,” Canney said. “We just don’t see that as the right application.”

The company first announced its Portable Modular Data Center product about 18 months ago, originally expecting containers to be a niche market for the oil and gas industry. IBM is now seeing interest from a much wider range of customers, including banks and telecommunication firms.

The first IBM container was shipped before the company announced the product officially. It was deployed at a client’s facility in Denmark, where a fire had broken out and an immediate solution was needed for the firm to remain operational.

IBM deployed its demo unit at the site of the company that initially rented it for six months but eventually purchased and kept the box.

“In the beginning, most clients … were looking at it out of curiosity,” Canney said. “As clients started to learn more about these solutions they came to get more detailed information. Now we’re in the phase where they’re actually being deployed on the larger scale.”

When asked about the number of containers IBM had sold since the official launch, Canney only said it was more than one and less than 150 units.

IBM sells 20- , 40- and 53-foot containers, able to be packed with IT equipment, power and cooling infrastructure from a number of vendors. Each box is tailored to any particular clients’ capacity and redundancy needs.

While many other vendors have set cooling approaches within their containers, IBM can build the solution using DC cooling, free cooling or chilled water. Multiple chilled-water approaches are possible, including overhead, in-row or the rear-door heat exchanger approach. Out of the three, IBM recommends the exchanger, saying it is the most efficient approach.

SGI says containers are here to stay
SGI, one of the first entrants to the market, uses one cooling approach in its Ice Cube container: a closed-loop system that combines heat exchangers and impeller fans.

The company – which was acquired by Rackable Systems earlier this year – first put its containerized solution on the market in March 2007 under the brand name Concentro (around the same time Sun introduced its container product). The solution has gone through a number of design changes since its launch and today the company sees containerized computing as an essential part of the industry.

“It’s become a trend that can’t be ignored any longer,” SGI Senior Director of Product Marketing Geoffrey Noer said about data center containers. “There really isn’t a major server vendor out there that doesn’t have one.”

SGI is also a server manufacturer, but Noer said the Ice Cube was not limited to using SGI servers only.

Regarding Bull’s entry to the market, Noer said it was a validation to the market’s importance, but added that the French company was likely to be “one of the last vendors to enter the space.”

IBM’s Canney said that while the market was growing and new players were sure to continue entering, he said he did not expect all the incumbent vendors to keep participating in it. “What you’re going to see is a shakeout of some original players.”

Containers shrink CAPEX for Microsoft
For Microsoft – one of the few enterprises that have chosen to fill entire mega-data centers with containers – the solution’s appeal differs from the rest, as it does not use them for overspill or remote deployments.

“It’s about pre-manufacturing modularity,” said Daniel Costello, director of data center research and engineering at Microsoft’s Global Foundation Services. The company saved on the capital expense of building data centers by deploying containers.

Most of the savings were gained from pre-manufacturing complete systems in a production-line style and installing them at the sites, instead of shipping separate components to the sites and paying the full labor costs of assembling the systems in a traditional manner.

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