HP has unveiled an entire data centre that fits into a standard shipping container.

The Performance-Optimized Datacenter (Pod) replaces the equivalent of a 4,000 square-foot data centre with a container-based collection of systems.

The 40-foot container houses roughly 3,500 CPU nodes and some 12,000 hard drives along with a walking area for a technician to access the hardware.

HP plans to target the Pod at cloud computing and web services vendors, as well as traditional high-performance computing industries.

The company claims that each unit can be custom-assembled by HP and delivered to a customer in under six weeks.

"Customers have more flexibility to balance their capital expenditures and operating expenses while quickly and seamlessly meeting their needs for additional capacity," said Christine Martino, vice president and general manager of HP's scalable computing and infrastructure organisation.

"HP's innovative Pod approach allows customers to deploy world-class, scalable, highly power-efficient data centre resources in just six weeks."

The Pod enters HP into a surprisingly crowded market for data centres in shipping containers.

IBM unveiled its container-based offering in June, and Sun Microsystems has offered a data-centre-in-a-box for nearly two years.

HP hopes that the vast customisation options on the Pod will set the programme apart from its rivals.

"If it fits in a 19in rack and cools from front to back or other standard way, it will likely work in the HP Pod," said Steve Cumings, director of infrastructure at HP's scalable computing and infrastructure organisation.