This week is Supercomputer ’08 in Austin, Texas. One of the most exciting things I’ll get to see at SC ’08 is a really geeky, but cool technology – portable data center containers – PODs, for short.
Sun started the whole POD concept – for a vendor other than the military, who has containerized equipment for years – in October 2007. Sun’s POD started as Project Blackbox and is now called the Sun Modular DataCenter or Sun MD.
Sun MD contains 280 rack units for servers and can be populated with 280 Sun SPARC Enterprise T150 servers – 4,480 processor cores and 35,840 compute threads. If Sun adds Sun Fire X4500 Servers (think Thumper), the Sun MD could also support as much as 3 Petabytes of storage. The Sun MD is standardized on 42U racks that are 24 to 30 inches wide. Standard 19-inch racks are optional.
Sun designed its POD with a magic PUE of 1.2 in mind – for every kilowatt hour of power a server consumes, it takes another KWH to power and cool it if you have a 1KWH server and it takes another KWH to power and cool it, you have a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of 2. PUE measures the energy efficiency of servers, storage and networking gear in much the same way consumers measure the energy efficiency of their automobile.
Introduced April 2007, Rackable Systems’ Concentro offers support for up to 9,600 processing cores in a 40-foot-by-8-foot shipping container. The mobile, self-contained module houses up to 1,200 of Rackable Systems’ rack-mount DC powered servers and up to 3.5PB of storage.
In April 2008, IBM joined the POD crowd of one with introduction of iDataPlex, a series of pre-populated, water-cooled racks that could be deployed in a 40-foot trailer.
IBM says it can stuff twice as many servers in the same space while requiring 40% less power. Specifically, IBM’s Portable Modular Data Center (PMDC) consists of a pod-form that includes power and cooling systems, and remote monitoring. IBM has said little more about the contents of its PMDC other than it uses industry standard components.
HP started in the POD game last summer with a goal of having an energy efficient and dense container with an overall PUE of 1.25. Its POD further used 19-inch standard racks and industry-standard servers, which are front to back cooled. Within the container 22 50U tall racks will allow 1,100 useable U – this equates to 3,500 nodes or 25,000 cores and 12,000 1.5TB hard drives of HP’s Extreme Storage for a total capacity of 18PB. Talk about data center power house in the box.
By the way, if you are attending SC ’08, you can tour HP’s container. You can register at HP’s booth.
