Data-Center-In-A-Box Gives Firms Flexibility
June 22, 2009
Financial firms which need a lot of compute power in a hurry can have it delivered by truck or ship usually in 8 to 12 weeks--and sometimes within days--to any location with power and data connections.
This is because a number of leading providers--Hewlett Packard, IBM, Sun Microsystems and Verari Systems--now market containerized data centers. These data-centers-in-a box come complete with servers, networking, and cooling in a shipping container that can be trucked on site, hooked up to a power supply and plugged into a firm's existing computing infrastructure.
Financial firms are using containers for a whole host of applications, said Ambreesh Khanna, group director for the global financial services industry at Sun Microsystems, from databases to financial services specific applications like Reuters RMDS (Reuters Market Data System) market data aggregation and distribution system and Calypso multi-asset-class trading and risk management software. Sun has provided a container used by a leading financial trading firm in New York but isn't permitted to identify the client.
"In addition, containers are being used to rapidly provision development environments for quality assurance. Some firms are also using containers for their low latency applications as containers eliminate network hops between applications," he added.
Containers are a radical shift in data center design. They can be built in factories with all the necessary skilled staff in one place to outfit the container with rack construction, cooling, cabling and installing UPS power backups.
Doing all that at a client location takes a lot of product management and scheduling and it will by necessity be spread over a lengthy period of time," said Chris Scott, site and facilities services executive at IBM in Europe. "When you are managing that in a factory where all they do is put data centers together and prepare them for transportation, you can squeeze that build time and allow for far more rapid deployment that a traditional build would permit."
Getting boxed in
The containers, which typically measure 20 or 40 feet in length, 8.5 feet wide and 9.5 feet high and--are usually packed to the walls with blades, servers or disks for storage, and have just a narrow aisle down the middle for the occasional visit from technicians--they designed to run dark with no one inside during operations.
But the key attraction is speedy deployment.
HP, for example, can take a customer from purchase order to an operating container, called Performance Optimized Datacenter (POD), in 12 weeks, said Wade Vinson, whose title at HP is PodFather.
"We are deeply engaged with every one of the large financial companies because they are out of data center space, or in the data center space they have they cannot deploy new systems quickly enough."
To some extent, containers are a way to solve the success that server blade--basically, servers on a card--brought to financial computing. HP's Vinson said that as an engineer who worked on two generations of HP blades, he takes credit for causing some of the problems he is now trying to solve. "Even though the blades we built were better on power and cooling efficiency, the firms used more and more of them and then realized their data center facilities couldn't keep up. The POD allows them to deploy servers very quickly with the lowest capital expenditure and the lowest operating expense," along with high power density.
