The Open19 Foundation, a new organization founded by Flex, GE Digital, HP Enterprise, LinkedIn and Vapor IO, plans to build a community for a new generation of open data centers and edge solutions. The newly founded organization aims to create 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 is now open for contributions and accepting new members to build a robust ecosystem of users, partners and suppliers.
“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, 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 solution was to develop a new model for building data centers using racks, cages and pre-defined network and power – enabling both traditional data centers and emerging business models like bare-metal cloud services.
“Hewlett Packard Enterprise is excited to be a founding member of Open19 as part of a community of technology partners building open standards that have applicability for datacenters of all sizes, helping to improve productivity, increase flexibility and enable fast deployment and integration,” said Justin Hotard, Vice President & GM HPE Service Provider, Hyperscale, and OEM Solutions. “HPE sees clear customer benefits for implementing modularized offerings that fit the needs of cloud businesses today and for the future.”
The Open19 Foundation is actively accepting new members – either as individuals, companies or industry partners. More information is available at open19.org.
“We are proud to have built and incubated Open19 and to continue our support as a founding partner of the Open19 Foundation,” said Sonu Nayyar, VP of Global Operations, LinkedIn. “We look forward to working alongside the rest of the founding partners and members in the future and to officially contribute the Open19 project to the larger community.”
