To Wade Vinson, sometimes referred to as “the PODfather”, containers were a no-brainer. As HP’s POD (performance optimised data center) architect and power and cooling strategist, Vinson developed the firm’s modular cooling system for server racks and his team did a lot of work on developing energy-efficient blade servers.
“The POD was a combination,” Vinson says. “It just made sense to bring all that stuff together as a solution.”
The business of shipping containers with compute, power and cooling equipment came to the market last year. Besides HP, some of the most notable vendors include Verari, SGI, Sun, Rackable and Dell. Containers had a slow start but have since picked up steam. Microsoft gave them a reputation boost by deploying containers at its Chicago data center, and Google – a company that rarely shares information about its data centers – released a video tour of one of its facilities made up entirely of containers.
HP launched its POD more than a year ago and shipped the first container in the beginning of 2009. When the company made its initial investment into container-related research and development, it saw several large customers interested in the product purely for scale-out purposes. Today, the vendor is looking at a more colourful picture.
“We have manufacturing customers that are using containers for their design and development, and for their HPC applications,” says Jean Brandau, product marketing manager for HP’s scalable computing and infrastructure division.
These customers usually want the full solution, complete with server racks and the entire power and cooling infrastructure needed to support the equipment. Some clients have ordered rackless PODs and some have ordered PODs with just a few racks in them. These customers are usually looking to containerise equipment from their existing data centers.
There are also military customers looking to use PODs to support private cloud services and enterprise customers that want to spread their infrastructure over wider geographical areas.
“We are seeing a range of customer uses and it is really becoming a typical data center model for many customers,” says Vinson.
THE MARKET, ACCORDING TO HP
The biggest segment of the containerised data center market (40 per cent) is organisations looking at containers for flexible capacity expansion, according to HP estimates. These customers demand solutions that are compatible with a variety of IT equipment, with design focused on greater energy efficiency and built-in redundancy. They also demand worldwide integration and support from the vendor.
HP estimates that customers interested in deploying containers for scale-out purposes represent 30 per cent of the market. Other uses include disaster recovery (10 per cent) and various custom deployments (20 per cent). The custom category includes military clients.
Neither scale-out nor disaster-recovery customers look for built-in redundancy in their PODs. Clients requiring scale-out tend to focus on maximising density and energy-efficiency instead. Disaster-recovery customers demand the PODs are compatible with a variety of equipment and emphasise the ability to deploy the units worldwide.
Brandau declined to disclose how many containers HP had sold or to whom it had sold them, but said the company was seeing “an incredible growth in interest in these products”.
According to Vinson, customers deploying PODs for different uses are also looking for different power densities. An average HPC customer wants a container that provides about 23kW per rack, while cloudservice providers look for an average rack density of 10kW, Vinson says. Average density for private cloud providers is 5-8kW and customers that turn to containers for data center expansion want 15- 20kW per rack.
IT'S ONLY NATURAL
In his previous job at Microsoft as a general manager for data center operations, Michael Manos deployed containers at the company’s Chicago facility. He has since taken a new position as senior vice president at the San Francisco-based REIT Digital Realty Trust.
One year after their arrival on the market, Manos says he is surprised by the industry’s uptake of containers, not having expected their popularity to grow as much as it did. And his new employer is not falling behind on the trend. “DRT has architected its facilities to be able to accept any of the containers out there,” Manos says.
He sees containers as the next step in deployment: after moving from being a server to a rack of servers, the unit is now becoming an equipment-filled container for many organisations. Manos notes that the dynamic between various container vendors has changed little since the market was born. “The market is still small enough so that players are still players in the [container] space.”
Vinson also sees containers as being an evolutionary step, but from a different perspective – as one of the enablers of the industry’s shift toward modularity.
“Modularity is the one thing you are going to see driving the data center,” he says. “The (common data center design) model – like anything we do in our economy today – is not sustainable.” Building out in modules and using only what is needed at the moment is a more sustainable model.
“The modularity that the POD and containers in general bring is the reason why they have parking spots for PODs in data centers.”
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