Open19 Foundation Established To Redefine Datacenters, Edge Platforms 

SUNNYVALE, Calif., May 24, 2017 -- The Open19 Foundation, a new organization established to build a community for a new generation of open data centers and edge solutions, launched today with founding members Flex, GE Digital, HP Enterprise, LinkedIn and Vapor IO. The Open19 Foundation 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 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 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.

The Open19 Foundation is actively accepting new members—either as individuals, companies or industry partners. More information is available at open19.org.

Supporting Quotes
“Flex is a strong advocate of the power of community development, and is honored to be a founding member and early developer of the Open19 Foundation,” said Chris Winslow, SVP and GM, Cloud and Data Center Business Unit, at Flex. “We are looking forward to leveraging our Sketch-to-Scale service model and global footprint to help facilitate implementation by early adopters around the world.”

"As a leader in the Industrial IoT, GE sees a need to establish a set of standards and customizable, flexible and economical data center designs, which will ultimately help our industrial customers capitalize on the latest advances in computing," said Darren Haas, Head of Predix Cloud Engineering, GE Digital. “As a founding member of Open19, we look forward to contributing to the growth of this community and building a new generation of open data centers and edge solutions."

“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 datacentres of all sizes, helping to improve productivity, increase flexibility and enable fast deployment and integration. HPE sees clear customer benefits for implementing modularized offerings that fit the needs of cloud businesses today and for the future.”- Justin Hotard, Vice President & GM HPE Service Provider, Hyperscale, and OEM Solutions

“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.”

“Open19 is the rack standard we’ve needed for a decade,” said Cole Crawford, CEO and Founder of Vapor IO. “With Open19, we can snap together Tower Edge Compute 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.”

About Open19 Foundation, Inc.

Open19 Foundation Inc. is a non-profit organization founded in 2017 by Flex, GE Digital, HP Enterprise, LinkedIn and Vapor IO. Its mission is to establish new open industry specifications for servers based on a common form factor. http://www.open19.org/

Source: Open19 Foundation