In 2008, Airbus had a problem: The amount of computing power needed to run the company's aircraft design simulators was growing exponentially in size, energy, and cost. Expensive upgrades were being added every year, but building an entirely new data center to house them wasn't cost effective. Airbus needed a way to double its computing power every year over the next three years while keeping costs stable.

The solution came in the form of four 12-meter-long steel containers known as a Performance Optimized Datacenter, or PODs. These portable high-performance computing modules provided the equivalent of nearly 1,000 square meters of data center space. And, they came equipped with the HP Cluster Platform 3000BL and 1,008 HP ProLiant BL280c G6 Server Blades — giving the Airbus engineers a much needed boost of power and speed in short order.

"Four months after we signed the contract with HP for the initial POD deployment, we were in full production," said Marc Morere, Manager of IT Projects and Architecture at Airbus. "At the beginning, we just had an empty field with nothing in it. HP poured the concrete and installed the POD, the cooling system, the electricity transformer, the batteries, and all the solution hardware. If we were building a normal data center it would have been impossible to do in four months."

Airbus got the computing power it needed to continue testing airplane aerodynamics, structure, acoustics, and avionics systems, and as a result decreased their operating expenses and power consumption by 40 percent. All thanks to an unassuming portable box loaded with HP power.

For the aircraft builders at Airbus, cost-effective computing power matters.

See more on Cloud Enabled computing.

• Data Center Transformation

Discover HP products and solutions that help you make it matter.