Just kidding, there are no people involved. But that's usually a plus when it comes to IT, isn't it? What CIO in his or her right mind doesn't want a staff composed entirely of robots... robots with big, red "REBOOT" switches right in the middle of their foreheads? Is that only my dream? Huh.

But anyway, HP isn't about to deliver that idealized workforce to you. Instead, they have halved both size and cost of their Performance Optimized Datacenter (POD), dropping it to a 20 foot shipping container weighing only 50,000 pounds, and cutting the price to a quite manageable $600,000. Which, I should note, is about what I would expect to pay for one of the aforementioned robots. But again, to be clear, those don't appear to be on sale from HP. Yet.

The whole datacenter-in-a-box thing has sort of disappeared from the limelight of late as cloud-computing and other means of off-loading processing entirely have come to the forefront. For the geeks among us, sure, it's neat to think that these things may be lined up in the Arctic tundra somewhere providing Google's data center services (they aren't, to my knowledge, but I wouldn't put it past them) but it's of little application to most CIOs. There are those few who are tasked with providing data processing services in remote, difficult-to-connect, low-bandwidth, rugged terrain, for whom these must be a boon, but that isn't in very many job descriptions these days... fewer and fewer as remote connectivity continues to improve. If the Air Force can fly Predators over Afghanistan from a bunker near Las Vegas, there isn't much of a frontier left for heavy duty data processing remotely.

Still, if you are among those with that need, you just got a way to fill it at half the price. Until the IT robot staff start rolling off the line, I suppose that's about as much as we can ask for.