Facebook Opens New Lab Space - Helping the Open Compute Project Community Move Up Stack

Early this month, we announced that we were adding another category of Open Compute Project (OCP) Foundation events -- OCP Technology Day [http://opencompute.org/blog/introducing-ocp-technology-day-30-august-2016-menlo-park-ca-registration-now-open/].

An OCP Technology Day is meant to showcase software solutions on OCP (Open) Hardware. Through these events, we move up the stack and continue to build on the strength of open hardware as we showcase how communities come together to consume, collaborate, and contribute to the infrastructure ecosystem.

Like most open communities, we stand on the “shoulders of giants”. In 2011, Facebook, along with Rackspace and Intel, formed the OCP Foundation to help drive open source hardware innovation in, near and around the data center ecosystem. The OCP community and its collaboration with others in the data center space continues to grow.

Today we are pleased to welcome another Facebook led collaborative initiative: the opening of a lab space in their Menlo Park office for vendors to test their software on open hardware—hardware that is open sourced through OCP—and for potential adopters to test-drive their software solutions. We are thrilled that we at OCP will be working closely with Facebook to help drive software solutions on OCP contributed hardware.

“We built a lab space specifically for vendors to test their software on open hardware. We hope this will help advance the industry even faster and make the idea of using open hardware more appealing to smaller companies that may not have the resources to develop or rely on custom solutions,” noted Facebook in a blog post earlier today.

It’s exciting to see software vendors, such as Canonical and Red Hat, test some of their products on hardware that has been contributed to OCP. We look forward seeing the results of this testing in our first OCP Technology Day. The hardware that was used for testing and validation by these organizations include:

We're looking forward to more open hardware being added to the lab and encouraging software vendors to test and validate their solutions. Additionally, we're working out the details of how the software that is tested and validated in Facebook’s lab space becomes part of the OCP reference architecture line-up.

If you can answer yes to any of the below questions, then you and your organization should consider leveraging Facebook’s lab and joining the OCP Foundation to have your software solutions listed as an OCP reference architecture.

  • Are you a current or a potential adopter of OCP hardware?
  • Do you have an interest in a particular software package?
  • Are you a software vendor considering certifying on OCP hardware?

About OCP:  

The Open Compute Project Foundation is a 501(c)(6) organization which was founded in 2011 by Facebook, Intel, Rackspace, Goldman Sachs and Andy Bechtolsheim. Our mission is to apply the benefits of open source to hardware and rapidly increase the pace of innovation in, near and around the data center and beyond.

Find out more about you can participate in the OCP Community at: http://opencompute.org/participate