Rackspace has announced its affiliation with the OpenPOWER Foundation, and is now an official member. With its membership in the OpenPower Foundation, Rackspace says it also expects to provide benefit to two other communities: OpenStack and the Open Compute Project. Rackspace announced its affiliation with OpenPOWER in a blog authored by Aaron Sullivan, senior director and distinguished engineer at Rackspace. According to Sullivan, Rackspace has already been involved with OpenPOWER for more than 18 months.
The OpenPOWER Foundation was founded in 2013 as an open technical membership organization to enable data centers to rethink their approach to technology. Member companies may customize POWER CPU processors and system platforms for optimization and innovation for their business needs. Through the newly formed OpenPower Foundation, IBM also recently released detailed technical specifications for its Power8 processor, inviting collaborators and competitors to innovate on the processor and server platform, providing a catalyst for new innovation.
“We worked amongst the founders for months before the foundation launched, and remained engaged after launch, but chose to remain quiet. We’ve been evaluating the technology and the movement for quite some time. Both the current results and future potential are so promising that we are preparing to build an OpenPOWER-based, Open Compute platform. And it will run OpenStack services. We intend to work alongside our partners in all three communities to achieve this goal. Today, we publicly communicate that intent,” noted Sullivan.
"In the world of servers, it’s getting harder and more costly to deliver the generational performance and efficiency gains that we used to take for granted. There are increasing limitations in both the basic materials we use, and the way we design and integrate our systems,” writes Sullivan adding, “OpenPOWER brings an increasingly open firmware stack, and deeper access to chips, memory, and storage than anywhere else. This is unprecedented, and it invites the open source community to participate at all layers.”
For more information about OpenPower Foundation, go to http://openpowerfoundation.org.