LinkedIn Leads Standardized Cloud Gear Alliance

LinkedIn is leading a project with muscular industry backers to produce componentized and standardized data center hardware that will be useful in small and medium-sized enterprise data centers as well as large cloud centers.

LinkedIn announced the Open19 Project in July last year. On Tuesday, it announced that HPE, GE Digital, Flex, and Vapor IO have said they're backing the Open19 Project and forming a foundation to support it. Vapor IO is a firm with products to manage edge computing, hybrid cloud computing and decentralized data centers collecting device data and sensor information flow. Flex supplies customizable manufacturing of electronics equipment.

Open19 data center gear includes a data center switch and is expected to include standardized storage options. Curt Belusar, senior director of hyper-scale engineering at HPE, said in a blog Tuesday. "Open19 community members can 'mix and match” components in the way that best meets their data center needs to increase operational efficiency and reduce cost." The Open19 project gets its name from its reliance on a standard 19-inch wide rack for mounting servers and other devices.

Open19 is as much about having a standard networking environment in multiple cloud data centers as it is about gear. In a blog post, Darren Haas, senior VP, cloud and data for GE Digital, said it was difficult to implement Predix when cloud environments constantly varied in their hardware and networking: "The ability to use an open network stack with a mix of simple interchangeable solutions sharing the same standard will help allow us to deliver racks quickly, reduce deployment costs and have a wider inventory..."

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