In June last year, the Open Compute Foundation appointed CircleB from Amsterdam, the Netherlands, as its first OCP (Open Computer Project) Solution Provider for the European market. Taurus Group, a conglomerate of traditional and value-added distribution as well as systems integration companies located in The Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany, has now acquired Circle B.
Circle B’s core business is focused on promoting the adoption of highly efficient and innovative data center and edge infrastructures in Europe as designed and used by hyperscalers. As an OCP Solution Provider, Circle B’s key focus is on delivering solutions based on hardware from the Open Compute Project. This may consist of IT racks, power supplies, servers, storage, switches and software enabling Software Defined Networking (SDN) capabilities.
In addition to Taurus Group’s strong global distribution infrastructure, large on-hand inventories of components and hardware in multiple warehouses, the company has its own enterprise integration division based on software defined data center solutions.
Circle B and Taurus Group believe that by joining their expertise, they are bringing a lot of added value to their customers, such as the offering of highly sustainable and efficient IT infrastructure, a streamlined distribution channel, faster delivery times, expanded integrated solutions, as well as Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) reduction.
After the acquisition, the founder and CTO of Circle B, Menno Kortekaas will remain in charge of the day-to-day operations of the OCP solutions delivery across Europe with business oversight from Taurus Group.
Hyperscalers
Founded in 2011 by Facebook, Intel, and Rackspace, the Open Compute Foundation’s goal is to apply open source principles to hardware intended for use in data centers and telecommunication facilities. OCP members can publish their own hardware designs via Open Compute. Other participants are allowed to use these designs for building and marketing their own products, while they’re also allowed to develop these designs further.
Many of the OCP designs made available come from ‘hyperscale’ companies such as Facebook and Microsoft. They have built very large data centers that use many hundreds of thousands of servers. The in-house development of hardware would offer these companies major technical and financial advantages. Think of lower energy consumption per individual server, or a drastically simplified systems management allowing one administrator for example to manage a factor of 100 or 1,000 more servers compared to a traditional data center design.
