Hewlett-Packard became the latest vendor to announce a "mini-data center" housed in a shipping container, which can provide a way for companies to add compute capacity when power and cooling systems in their existing data centers are maxed out.

HP's Performance Optimized Data Center, or POD, will be available in the U.S. by the end of the third quarter and worldwide a few months after that, the company said Wednesday. HP joins Sun Microsystems, Rackable Systems and IBM, among others, who sell similar products.

It sounds like a gimmick, but proponents say the portable data centers can solve real problems. They are customized 20-foot or 40-foot shipping containers that vendors fill with servers and storage gear before shipping them out. Customers plug in a cooling supply, power supply and a network connection, and the mini-data centers are ready to use.

The containers provide a way for resource-constrained facilities to add compute power without having to build a new data center, which is expensive and takes a year or more. They can also be used for disaster recovery, by setting one up on the grounds of a satellite office, for example.

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