Steve Cumings, director of infrastructure, scalable computing and infrastructure at HP, says that in spite of the economic downturn, companies are still demanding energy efficient solutions like its "pods" or modular data centers. (For pod newcomers, these are shipping containers that come prepackaged with server racks, power and cooling equipment. Sun was the first to come out with such a product.) "The typical data center today is more than seven years old and running out of power and cooling," he says. Financial clients, he says, are adding pods to supplement overtaxed data centers. "We're seeing some financial customers looking to purchase one to four pods, we also have financial customers looking at larger installations of pods instead of brick and mortar," he says. While he rejects the image of a trailer home park, he says customers are setting up "park environments." For instance, Microsoft is planning to build a data center in Chicago based on containers.

In the latest "data center in a box" announcement, HP said today that its pod, which is similar to Sun's except that it's twice as long and boasts more and larger server racks, now works with uninterruptible power systems and water-based cooling technology from Active Power.

According to Jim Clishem, president and CEO of Active Power, his company's power systems are about 10% more efficient than competing UPSs, which could result in about a $1 million per year operational savings on a 10 megawatt deployment of a pod. He says Active Power's solution can pack twice the power in half the space of other power supplies because of its use of flywheels. And while the average power usage effectiveness (PUE) of a data center is 1.8 to 2.0, he says this pod configuration will deliver a PUE of less than 1.25.

Although HP's pod doesn't support mainframes, "everything a customer can fit in a rack in a data center will fit in a pod," Cumings says. The HP pod fits 22 50-U racks and can be shipped completely outfitted " "a giant suitcase full of IT, all deployed and ready to go," he calls it. A fully stocked pod could hold 3,500 compute nodes or 12 petabytes of storage, or a combination of the two.

The price of an empty pod is $1.3 million. Active Power's 450-kilowatt energy and cooling solution for the pod comes to $1 million for power and cooling, 25% less than others, could be a lot cheaper.