APC, Datapod launch shipping container datacentres

Canberra-based datacentre provider, Datapod Australia, has partnered with APC Australia to launch a new range of containerised datacentres predicted to make $150 million in exports and 30 jobs over five years.

The Datapod solution features a series of custom-engineered shipping containers with insulation, cooling solutions and racks for IT equipment. The pods can be linked together to provide more cooling, security and space for datacentre equipment.

APC country general manager, Gordon Makryllos, said his company would be responsible for selling the product.

“We’re talking to a number of key customers in the resources and mining industry and emergency services type organisations. If there’s a war or a natural disaster, one of the things that needs to be deployed very quickly is IT capacity,” he said.

Although Google and Sun Microsystems currently hold a series of patents on containerised datacentres, with the latter producing the Project Blackbox, Datapod managing director, Scott Carr, said the new offering did not infringe.

“We’re an engineering company not an IT vendor. We don’t provide computing equipment in the shipping containers. What we do is provide site infrastructure. We’re not really competing in the IT space,” he said.

Carr said the solution came out of customer frustration with the investment of time and money needed to build traditional datacentres.

“Our customers desperately needed the technology APC had available but we weren’t able to deploy it in the time frames that they needed and we were really at the mercy of existing facilities that really weren’t designed to take them," he said. "The bottleneck was really in the facilities.”

While Sun’s solution comes with the vendor’s own servers and operating systems, Makryllos said the Datapod/APC offering’s biggest drawcard was its ability to work with a variety of brands.

“We’re not the first to come out with this, but the first generation missed the mark by quite a bit,” he said.

“If you look at this Datapod/APC solution, it’s vendor neutral. A customer can pick any server and architecture they want.”

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