HP builds assembly line for datacentres

HP's Podworks facility in Houston can produce one server every 12 seconds

BARCELONA: HP has announced plans to mass-produce modular, container-based enterprise datacentres.

Speaking at a press event in Barcelona Tuesday, HP executive vice president and general manager Dave Donatelli said HP wanted to become "the Henry Ford of server production" and has built an assembly line in Houston, Texas that will speed the construction and delivery of its Performance Optimized Datacenter (POD) IT environments.

Donatelli said the move reflects the fact that the "one-off bespoke" datacentre design and deployment model is "simply unsustainable".

Dubbed HP Podworks, the Houston facility is able to produce one server every 12 seconds and "fulfill any order from anyone", Donatelli said.

One customer that stood up at the Barcelona event was Microsoft, saying that it had acquired 22 POD units comprising of 40,000 nodes that HP delivered in six weeks.

HP and Microsoft both declined to go into detail on what servers are being put into the POD units, though they did say that the compute power of a whole datacentre can be created in six weeks rather than "years".

HP said a similar facility exists in Europe but would not divulge its exact location, simply stating that it meets the various electrical and water supply standards of the region. Donatelli did confirm that the facility was shipping POD units, though declined to give details.

HP said that unlike similar container-based datacentres developed in the past by the likes of Sun and SGI, its units offer ancillary services such as UPS.