Based on HP Converged Infrastructure, the HP POD enables clients to expand rapidly while addressing critical data center challenges related to space, power and cost. HP’s modular data center offerings include the HP POD 20c, 40c and the 240a. Also referred to as the HP EcoPOD, the HP POD 240a delivers the most energy-efficient design, using 95 percent less power than conventional data centers, and it can reduce initial data center capital costs up to 75 percent.

Local governments maximize resources to achieve $6 million in savings

The City and County of El Paso, Texas, needed to pool limited IT resources while supporting long-term growth. El Paso chose an HP POD housing HP blade servers and storage to service the IT operations of law enforcement, the judicial system and administration, which provide services to a combined population of more than 800,000.

HP designed the primary data center in a 40-foot HP POD and redesigned the existing county failover center, which consisted of aging Dell and EMC hardware and software. The deployed HP POD contains HP ProLiant BL460 servers for high efficiency and offers three-phase power to maximize the amount of power that can be delivered to each rack.

El Paso’s HP POD deployment has resulted in taxpayer savings of nearly $6 million by eliminating service duplication and consolidating IT departments.(3) The municipalities received Texas Association of Counties Best Practices Award for Innovation and the City-County Cooperation Award recognition for forward thinking and cooperation in this large-scale IT deployment.

“The vision of both The City and County of El Paso is to promote technology and efficiency for the combined entities’ customer base,” said David Garcia, director, Information Technology and Project Oversight,

El PasoCounty. “HP has carefully assisted the City and County IT teams with the planning and deployment of the HP POD to deliver modern and redundant data center facilities that benefit the taxpayer at large through better public service delivery.”

Integrating business units onto a singular platform

Skoda Power, a leading provider of technology, products and services for power generation based in Plzeň, Czech Republic, recently deployed a 40-foot HP POD to boost computing performance and save energy.

When Skoda Power became a subsidiary of Doosan, an industrial facilities company in 33 countries, the two companies consolidated their IT infrastructures into a single shared platform. Skoda Power selected an HP POD to provide rapid, cost-effective and flexible data center capacity that is energy-efficient and environmentally sustainable. The water-cooled HP POD consumes up to 40 percent less power than alternative solutions, decreasing operating expenses and delivering increased power capacity.

Increasing capacity to compete with HPC

A growing number of research institutions are selecting the HP POD to drive their HPC operations forward with modular computing. To support a new supercomputer system as part of the Australian government’s $1.1 billion Super Science Initiative, scientific and research organization iVEC deployed an HP POD 20c to fuel research in the radio astronomy, nanoscience, geoscience, and other leading computational communities.

“In order to service our community effectively, we needed a facility that could deliver massive scale-up capabilities” said Andrew Rohl, executive director, iVEC. “HP’s POD technology will enable Australian research organizations to compete on the global stage as we further development of codes, techniques and best practices to significantly increase our compute capacity.”

Similarly, the University of California, Los Angeles, extended its virtual HPC cluster to house 1,500 compute nodes – the equivalent of 5,000 square feet. As a result, the university is currently saving nearly $198,000 per year in power costs.