Open Compute Project enlists AT&T, Verizon while growing telco support
Open Compute
Telecommunications giants are clearly warming up to open technologies for building data centers to handle the massively compounding pools of data coming in from mobile and other connected devices.
A slew of mobile providers, including AT&T and Verizon, among others, have pledged solidarity with the Open Compute Project, a five-year old foundation and engineering community working to innovate server, storage and data center hardware designs at scale.
One of the biggest and most familiar names attached to the Open Compute Project has been Facebook, which has boasted a number of contributions to the initiative.
A few of the more recent debuts from the world's largest social network was its first system-on-a-chip (SoC) compute server, code named Yosemite, as well as an open software framework, OpenBMC, for system management.
Other prominent partners have often come from the hardware side of tech, including Intel, AMD, Nvidia and Microsoft.
Jason Taylor, president and chairman of the OCP Board on top of serving as vice president of infrastructure at Facebook, reflected in a blog post about hardware contributions to the program.
"Industry expertise is an important part of establishing new opportunities and paths for collaboration around open hardware," Taylor wrote. "For example, Nokia has announced that they will incorporate OCP designs into its AirFrame Data Center Portfolio."
Through the additions of AT&T and Verizon as well as Deutsche Telekom, EE and SK Telecom, the phone operators are forming the new OCP Telco Project.
Described as an open forum in Wednesday's announcement, the project's objectives include building the Open Compute Project ecosystem in order to then support telco deployment and management needs along with further commitment to improving data center infrastructures.
"We are optimistic about the potential of open hardware to bring large-scale gains to the telecommunications industry, and that starts with increased participation," Taylor posited. "Today, a number of leading telecommunications companies announced they are joining OCP to support the goal of openly working to drive more efficiency, flexibility, and customization in data center technologies."