Dan Olds over at the Register blogs this week on HP’s new Pod-Works factory, which will soon start mass producing container-based datacenters.
HP estimates that the POD factory will result in an 8x speed-up in system deployment. They also say that it is 37 per cent more efficient and 45 per cent less expensive than a typical data center. I’m not sure exactly how that’s measured, but it’s obvious to me that there would be significant savings from this model.”
Containers like the HP Pod make a lot of sense for scale-out datacenters, but I have yet to see wide deployment at HPC facilities. They may yet have their day, though. Image a future #1 TOP500 site as a parking lot full of containers deployed just long enough to run the Linpack.