Data centers are huge, power-hungry and inefficient. They consume electricity and IT budgets at staggering rates. HP wants to change that. The company's enterprise server division is developing efficient, compact machinery that's set to shatter our views of the traditional data center. 

The HP Performance Optimized Data Center 240a, or HP EcoPOD, is about 1/10th the size of a traditional data center, and it's portable. The system fits into two 40-foot shipping containers and includes integrated power, cooling, security, fire suppression, management and monitoring suites. The whole thing is built in a factory to customer specs and comes pre assembled. Simply unpack it and plug it together. That means the EcoPOD can be ready to serve up data and crunch numbers within 12 weeks of placing an order with HP. The typical data center takes more than 24 months to get up and running.

Once assembled, the EcoPod is just 45 feet long and 23 feet wide. Despite its diminutive size, the data center can house 44 standard 50-server racks for a total of 2,200 servers with more than 7,000 server nodes. And there's space for 24,000 large-form-factor hard drives, too. 

The system comes with two CleanSource flywheel-based UPS systems that can crank out up to 2.3MW, giving users more than enough time to switch to generators if there's an interruption in power.

To keep it all from melting down, the EcoPOD uses Adaptive Cooling. The system pumps in outside air to cool the servers whenever possible and cranks up the A/C to cool things off depending on the environment and server load. Adaptive Cooling can push more than 3800 cubic feet of air over the servers every minute.

The EcoPOD uses half the energy of a typical data center. A data center's efficiency is measured by Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE)—how much of its total power consumption is actually used for computing. A data center with a PUE of 1 would use all of its electricity for computing. A data center with a PUE of 2 would only use half its energy for computing. The EcoPOD has an average PUE between 1.05 and 1.3, depending on server load and cooling system use. Normal data centers only manage a PUE of 2.4. 

The EcoPOD is also inexpensive—it costs just $500,000 a year to run. Brick-and-mortar data centers cost nearly 31 times that to run.

The Alchemy NeoTools suite of mainframe migration software runs natively on HP servers.

Sources: HP, Gizmodo