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Purdue U Goes Modular with HP Data Center

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 08/03/10

Purdue University has chosen HP's Performance Optimized Datacenter (POD) to expand and expedite its ability to deliver research projects. Earlier this year, the institution began rolling out a strategic plan for IT that included a focus on improving operations.

The university has been adding server clusters to its data center every summer for the last three years. This time Purdue is going modular. The idea behind this unique HP datacenter is to enable it to be deployed quickly and fully outfitted for situations where an organization needs a temporary data center or for disaster recovery as a backup data center. It's available in 20- or 40-foot containers and has rack capacity of 500U and up to 290 kilowatts of non-redundant power capacity.

By implementing the portable data center, Purdue estimated, the university can expand its research capabilities by 50 percent within months for less than a third of the cost of building a new data center.

"We provide the resources for world-leading research, and delaying this work while building a new data center facility simply wasn't an option," said John Campbell, associate vice president of academic technologies. "With the HP POD, we'll deploy an entire new data center in a matter of months at a fraction of the cost of a traditional data center, while being able to support all of our current, as well as anticipated, research initiatives."

The university is also tapping HP products for a new 1,000-node cluster in its Rosen Center for Advanced Computing. The cluster will use HP ProLiant DL165z G7 servers with dual 12-core AMD Opteron 6100-series processors.