Software holding back container computing

By Iain Thomson on Nov 7, 2008 3:19 PM
Filed under Hardware

Container computing, where mini-data centres are housed within standard shipping containers, is being held back by poor software integration according to system builders.

Sun, HP, IBM and numerous system builders are all shipping systems designed to fit into a standard shipping container but according to some the market is not growing as fast as it should be.

“The market is a little slow,” George Reitz, vice president of sales for Rackable Systems told vnunet.com.

“Until we see better software support then that will be the case. At the moment only the biggest or fastest companies are using them to augment existing systems.”

Container systems have only been around for a few years because the technology required didn’t make them practical. Each container holds the processors, hard drives and cooling systems necessary for a fully portable system that can be moved easily around the country.

“Wall Street is showing strong demand, largely due to space constraints,” Ed Holden, server products manager for systems builder Verari Systems told vnunet.com.

“The closer the system is to Wall Street the faster they can get their data back. We can drop a containerised data centre into a parking lot very quickly.”

He continued that they were also proving popular with the disaster recovery industry, as they could be scattered around the country ready to go at a moments notice, but were also being used to augment existing data centres quickly.

“The cost makes ROI sense,” he said.

“We can ship a container in 90 days, compared to the year it would take to build a data centre, with all the uncertainty over permits and the like.”