theCUBE at HP Discover in Barcelona

Overwhelmed with the amount unstructured information coming in from outside the firewall, CIOs are scurrying to find the talent and technology solutions they need to effectively tap into their growing troves of data. Like most of its peers, tech giant Hewlett-Packard is trying to capitalize on this trend with a multi-pronged product strategy spanning the entire enterprise stack.

On the software side, HP offers HAVEn, a unified platform for data-driven apps that combines Hadoop with solutions from Vertica and Autonomy. Each component is available separately, which gives customers the freedom to mix and match according to their needs.

The company’s hardware lineup is just as formidable, consisting of low-latency 3PAR arrays, scale-out ProLiant servers and perhaps most notably, a line of data center containers called PODs. First introduced in 2008, these hyper-converged infrastructure modules allow customers to rapidly expand their data center capacity and keep up with data growth more easily than before.

The latest addition to the POD family is the 20ce, which made its debut on theCUBE during the recently concluded HP Discover 2013 conference in Barcelona. The configuration was developed in collaboration with Intel to meet the specific power and cooling requirements of European customers, HP Services senior vice president Antonio Neri told attendees. With 26 power supplies and 20 cooling units, the platform has a PUE of 1.08, which should prove attractive the EMEA data center industry as it shifts from traditional sources to renewable energy. The 20ce supports up to 8 46U racks and 200 nodes. HP says that the POD can be deployed in as little as eight weeks for about half the cost and using less than half the energy of traditional data centers.

HP is not the only company pushing the POD. Phoenix-based IO claims to be bringing so-called software-defined data center capabilities to the data center itself and is building out data center space globally.