Modular datacentres from HP boost R&D at Airbus

So-called PODs were up and running just four months after HP took the order

Aircraft manufacturer Airbus has taken on two HP Performance Optimised Data Centers (PODS) to help with research and development for the design of its aircraft.

The PODs were created in Erskine, Scotland, and are in effect self-contained datacentres, including servers, storage, networking, software, management and integrated power and water cooling.

The PODS contain 22 50U full-depth industry-standard racks and 2,016 clustered HP ProLiant BL280 G6 blade servers, meaning the two 12-metre long containers can deliver the equivalent of 1,000 square metres of datacentre space.

The modular PODS were delivered to Airbus sites in Toulouse, France, and Hamburg, Germany. They are currently deployed in Airbus parking lots, as all that is required to deploy the datacentres is a "power source, a source of water, networking connections and a decent surface underneath, typically asphalt as they're not featherweight", according to Ed Turkel, manager of HPC product and technology marketing at HP.

The water-cooled HP PODS consume up to 40 per cent less power than many standard datacentres that run at a power usage effectiveness (PUE) of approximately 2.0; the HP POD, on the other hand, runs with a PUE of 1.25.

The PUE is determined by dividing the amount of power entering a datacentre by the power used to run the computer infrastructure within it. PUE is expressed as a ratio, with overall efficiency improving as the quotient decreases towards one.

The PODS deliver power capacity in excess of 15KW/m2.

Turkel said the PODS are currently selling into a number of industries, with any business looking to expand quickly and in a modular fashion likely to take them up. "Building a datacentre with bricks and mortar can take five to 10 years to plan and build. These PODS took four months to ship following the receipt of the purchase order."

Turkel said that typical POD customers might be web hosting and cloud service providers, as well as industrial, academic or government sites.

"Airbus is one of many of our customers that need high-performance computing for its work. To optimise the design of a plane and ensure minimal weight, a design team will need to run many, many computer simulations of its designs, and this requires an enormous amount of compute power," said Turkel.