Faced with a power shortage in its existing data centre, Purdue University turned to a containerized data centre, Hewlett-Packard's Performance-Optimized Data Centre, or POD, to get a massive compute cluster online in short order. Like other containerized data centres, HP's POD comes preconfigured with all the necessary racks, cabling, power and cooling needed to stand up new data centre capacity quickly, and at a fraction of the cost of building out a new facility, which some analysts estimate at US$25 million for every 1 megawatt of capacity.

In Purdue's case, HP's POD also cost much less than leasing colocation space, said John Campbell, the associate vice president of academic technologies at the West Lafayette, Ind.-based university. "For 60% of the cost [of a colocation facility], we could place a POD on campus," Campbell said.

Source: Search Data Center

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