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A new IT community resource, the Open19 Foundation, was born May 23 at a special event in Milpitas, Calif., on the shoulders of founding members Flex, GE Digital, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, LinkedIn and Vapor IO.
The Open19 Foundation aims to create new-generation, project-based open hardware and software solutions for the data center industry. One of the initial hardware contributions to the foundation will be the Open19 Platform industry specification that defines a cross-industry common server form factor, creating a flexible and economical data center and edge solution for operators of all sizes.
The Open19 Foundation will be working alongside other industry consortia, such as the Open Compute Project and the Apache Foundation, to develop servers based on a common form factor.
“The Open19 Platform represents a simple solution for a complex problem, so it’s no surprise that the response from the community has been so strong,” said Yuval Bachar, president of the Open19 Foundation and Principal Engineer, Global Infrastructure Architecture and Strategy at LinkedIn.
“With the formation of the foundation, and the addition of our new partners, we can now begin capitalizing on this interest from the community and building on the vision for the Open19 open platform.”
The concept for Open19 came out of a search for a solution that would not only fit any location and facility footprint but also optimize for any size data centers to a degree that was previously only practical for very large data centers, the foundation said. The solution was to develop a new model for building data centers using racks, cages and predefined network and power—enabling both traditional data centers and emerging business models, such as bare-metal cloud services.
“Open19 is the rack standard we’ve needed for a decade,” Vapor IO CEO and founder Cole Crawford said. “With Open19, we can snap together (telecom) tower edge computing data centers like Lego bricks. We can send a crew out to an edge environment, such as at the base of a cell tower, and stand up a new data center in minutes. Interchangeable parts mean customer and field ops teams have a common interface that works regardless of the components inside the chassis.”
The Open19 Foundation is now open for contributions and accepting new members to build an ecosystem of users, partners and suppliers. Go here for more information.