HP Flexible

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Data Center
Brochure

the future data center.

Can you boost IT capacity
on demand to support rapid
business growth?
Many IT organizations, like yours, face the urgent
need to meet ever-increasing business demands while
finding better ways to contain capital expenditure
(CAPEX) and operating expenditure (OPEX). Data
center strategy was a top-of-mind predicament two
years ago, and it’s no less a predicament post the
economic downturn. It has, in fact, intensified with
the majority of enterprise organizations—especially
the telecom, financial, and infrastructure service
providers—facing growth constraints with too little
data center space. There is also the immediate risk of
downtime with insufficient power and environmental
conditions that threaten operational continuity.
As facilities near their end of life, you need
to determine the way forward to support your
growing business with adequate IT availability.
This involves making crucial decisions that can
impact how effectively IT can respond to future
technology and market changes. While building
greenfield data centers are both time-consuming and
expensive, retrofitting traditional data centers with
new technologies can mean disruption to current
operations. And the benefits that come with the
advanced technologies diminish in proportion to the
complexity of the retrofit. But, until now, there has
been no end-to-end technology provider with the
ability to offer a way out.
Responding to this dilemma faced by enterprise
organizations around the world, HP has introduced
an industry-changing solution that challenges the
conventional thinking in data center design. We
bring you HP Flexible Data Center (Flexible DC):
An approach that can help you build a flexible and
scalable data center—with half the cost and in half the
time it takes to build a traditional data center.
The future data center has arrived
Current economic instability, together with dynamic
market and technology developments, are making
traditional monolithic designs a thing of the past.
Recent design trends have seen greater flexibility
through modularity, and you may have modularized
certain aspects of your data centers already. Now,
HP has packaged the recent evolutionary approaches
to modularity and warehouse-type data centers—all
in one product offering: HP Flexible DC. The solution
offers you the opportunity to build and run a very
cost-effective data center with the levels of flexibility
and availability that can help you support challenging
business demands with ease.
With HP Flexible DC, you can realize an entirely
modular data center. HP makes this possible using
prefabricated construction material, a standardized
approach to mechanical and electrical components,
and designed processes. We can help you get your
greenfield data center up and running in much less
time, at massively reduced CAPEX, and with improved
operational efficiency and a future-ready technology
platform in place. From start to finish, we assign a
customer representative as your single point of contact
to manage the building and commissioning of your
new data center.
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 Figure 1: The “Butterfly” concept
Quadrant 1
Quadrant 2
This compelling solution has been conceived to enable
IT to be responsive to spontaneous business growth
and to be flexible enough to meet every changing
phase of technology. It is a formulation of many ideas,
culminating as a jump-off point for the next generation
of data center design.
HP Flexible DC balances simplicity with the correct
levels of sophistication. This balance starts with
CAPEX allotments that are proportional to current
needs, lowering future investments while maintaining
flexibility for unknown or unpredictable growth. The
solution integrates our core capabilities, including
scalability, modularity, cloud computing, rapid
provisioning, and highly efficient green computing.
It is a conservative greenfield solution, made up
of four quadrants of 800 kilowatts each, built
around a core block—providing a 3.2 megawatt
modular solution in total. This can be assembled in a
campus configuration that can extend up to hundreds
of megawatts.
The blueprint of the future IT
powerhouse
HP Flexible DC introduces a new standard in
data center design, nicknamed “Butterfly”. The
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Center support area
Quadrant 3
Quadrant 4
butterfly‑shaped four-quadrant data center plan
accounts for unknown changes in technology and
provides an ability to build out the data center in
phases, as needed. Figure 1 illustrates the modularity
of “Butterfly”.
The HP Flexible DC “Butterfly” design concept
has been crafted for radically improved simplicity,
standardization, supply chain management, speed to
market, and costing. Core design highlights include:
• Prefabricated building blocks
• Integrated security
• No mechanical chiller plants
• High-efficiency uninterruptable power supply (UPS)
system
• No raised floor
• Scalability (build one quadrant at a time)
• Low power usage effectiveness (PUE) levels
Through standardized options, the entire process
is streamlined. And a robust and adaptive
selection mechanism is provided for cooling and
power distribution.
Figure 2: Comparison between a current next-generation data center and HP Flexible DC for an example site located at Charlotte, North Carolina

State-of-the-art data center HP Flexible DC

annual electricity consumption annual electricity consumption

1,962,240 225,478
3,481,618 517,672
1,121,280

655,165
2,728,304 346,227
1,991,709

1,222,185

818,869

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28,032,000
28,032,000

PUE = 1.36 PUE = 1.18

IT load Fans Cooling tower fans Evaporation cooling IT equipment Supply fans
water pumps
Electrical distribution losses Chilled water pumps Humidification
Electrical losses Compressors Scavenger fans
Water-cooled chillers Condenser water pumps

Slash the capital and operating costs a part-load operating environment; and removing
equipment, conversions, and transformations in the
of your next greenfield data center power supply chain.
The HP Flexible DC cost structure presents lower entry
Next, HP Flexible DC is designed to work with the
costs compared to current data center solutions for
external environment. It meets the majority of its
which the costs to build and operate are no longer
cooling needs by using the local climate to absorb
sustainable. HP brings you the cost advantage through:
and dissipate the heat generated in the data center.
• Energy-efficiency best practices built into the data So far, only cool and dry climates have been suitable
center design for this type of cooling system. But the cooling
• Minimal bidding of construction services concepts used in HP Flexible DC enable good
• Reduced field labor with prefabricated components performance even where the climate conditions are
not ideal. Sensible heat transfer technology is used
• Floor plans configured to load variable density
to counter the effects of humid and varying climates.
requirements
HP Flexible DC applies expanded environmental
• High-cost real estate stacked to improve utilization standards within the data center and adapts cooling
Our new cooling and electrical distribution systems applications typically used in industrial environments.
provide great opportunity for energy savings. The To get the full benefits of using this concept, the
HP Flexible DC model lowers PUE levels and water configuration of the data center in general has to
usage, reducing the data center’s carbon footprint follow these criteria:
while maintaining a high level of reliability. Depending • Server racks with a hot aisle containment configuration
on the location of the data center, PUEs of 1.2 or less
• No raised floor air distribution
can be achieved.
• Air handlers distributed across a common header on
Energy conservation is achieved in two broad ways. the exterior of the building for even air distribution
First, lowering utility and distribution costs for the
• Air diffusers located in the exterior wall, connected
electrical systems means using more energy-efficient
to the distribution duct, and lined up with the cold
equipment, especially the UPS systems; enabling
aisle rows

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 Figure 3: Expandable site configurations
• The room made a flooded cold aisle
• The hot aisle ducted to a plenum, normally created
through the use of a drop ceiling, enabling the hot
air to return through the drop ceiling plenum back to
the air handlers
• Server racks thoroughly sealed to lower the
recirculation of waste heat back into the inlets of
nearby servers
Roll out a new data center fast
enough to beat business expectations
HP Flexible DC has the potential to revolutionize the
way data centers are planned and constructed. Our
standardized set of components, efficient supply chain
management, and prefabricated mechanical and
electrical solutions greatly reduce onsite construction
periods. And our menu-driven selection process can
help you lessen the decision-making periods.
The solution is delivered by HP Critical Facilities
Services, which specializes in aligning IT and critical
facilities requirements to create fine-tuned facilities
that meet high-performance and cost-efficiency needs.
Our approach is to align IT and facility teams in the
pre‑design phase, respecting all perspectives.
The highly experienced professionals from HP Critical
Facilities Services have worked with financial services,
telecommunications, information technology, broadcast,
and healthcare enterprises around the world, as well
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as numerous federal, state, and local government
agencies. With industry-leading capabilities, the team
focuses on desktop-to-data center optimization to drive
better business outcomes.
Respond to future changes and needs
with agility and efficiency
Recent adoption of design innovation has focused
on increasing modularity and offering mixed levels
of availability. This, together with trends toward
infrastructure convergence and “cloud infrastructure
as a service”, has resulted in the advent of greater
modularity in data center designs.
The standard building blocks of HP Flexible DC are
forged from strategies developed by HP engineers
and designers. The solution addresses the data center
communities’ demand for more IT capacity, more
quickly. Going beyond, it provides a flexible platform
from which future changes in technology can be
addressed at a later date without over-investing in
anticipated needs. Also, it helps avoid stranded assets
by responding fast to business needs.
You can configure each quadrant of the HP Flexible DC
“Butterfly” design to different levels of availability, power
density, and redundancy. The solution’s multi‑tier hybrid
design approach allows you to adjust availability levels
according to different levels of application criticality, by
hosting similar levels in the assigned quadrants.
The key component of a fail-proof data
center strategy: Proven partnership
The HP Critical Facilities Services team comprises
renowned consultants in the domain of data center
design. As trusted advisors to Fortune 100 companies
and beyond, we have a deep understanding of
your challenges to shape a suitable solution. The
HP Flexible DC is a disruptive innovation that has the
potential to enable a more in-sync partnership with the
needs of your business. This was not possible with the
methods used in the past.
HP can partner with you every step of the way as
you plan a data center strategy that factors in future
business and technology changes. We begin by
helping you select the right site for your greenfield
data center and plan your capacity according to your
projected business growth. Going beyond, we can
help you make and justify capital outlay decisions that
can open up strategic possibilities for your business.

Global citizenship at HP
At HP, global citizenship is our commitment to hold
ourselves to high standards of integrity, contribution,
and accountability in balancing our business goals
with our impact on society and the planet. To learn
more, visit www.hp.com/hpinfo/globalcitizenship,
and for information about the HP Eco Solutions
program, go to www.hp.com/ecosolutions.

Enter the next phase of data center revolution.

Visit: www.hp.com/services/flexdc

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© Copyright 2010 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. The only
warranties for HP products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein
should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. HP shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein.

Services which are considered professional engineering services are offered and will only be provided by professional, licensed engineers. In the
United States, these services are offered by EYP Mission Critical Facilities, Inc., which is a wholly owned subsidiary of HP.

4AA2-0621ENW, Created August 2010