Electricity dictates datacentre locations

Portable datacentres are quick to deploy

The shortage of electricity in London datacentres is forcing hosting companies and large organisations to build datacentres close to substations with spare power.
Locations outside the M25 in Surrey, Hertfordshire and Essex are favoured for datacentres housed in shipping containers.

Containers can add fast, flexible data processing and storage capacity to firms’ bricks and mortar datacentres. HP this week followed rivals Sun Microsystems and IBM in offering the Pod, which ships in either 20ft or 40ft pre-configured containers.

The Pod houses up to 3,520 computer nodes or 12,000 hard disk drives, and requisite network and cooling equipment ­ 21 will be available for either purchase or lease later this year.

Sun’s MD S20 container was first launched in 2006, while IBM announced its portable modular datacentre last month.

“Those with security concerns will stick with bricks and mortar, but many customers wish they could build a datacentre somewhere else because of high energy bills,” said Steve Cuming, HP director of scalable computing and infrastructure.

Mike Hills, director of products and services at UK co-location company Adapt said: “Customers are more open-minded, and co-location companies have held them to ransom because it is difficult to move datacentres once you have purchased the equipment. But many customers still prefer to put mission-critical servers in tier-4 facilities.”

Companies expected to use containers to support cloud computing strategies include Microsoft, which is building new datacentre facilities in Chicago.