The Open19 Foundation, an open data center hardware initiative founded in 2016 by LinkedIn, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), and VaporIO, is now a Linux Foundation project.
After the addition of Cisco as a board member to Open19 Foundation late last year, Open19 has joined the Linux Foundation as the data center hardware community for the LF ecosystem.
The primary open hardware platform
Open19 has been designed by innovators from across the data center industry and is ideal for edge environments and custom cloud data center deployments. Open19 Foundation President Zachary Smith said,
Zachary Smith, President, Open19 Foundation
We determined that we needed a broader set of enterprise and service provider users to really widen the adoption of the technology. It just happened to align with what the Linux Foundation was doing. We are the primary open hardware platform for the Linux Foundation membership. And now we have two of the three largest OEMs — HPE and Cisco — adopting and supporting Open19, as well as a wide variety of ODMs.
Open19 is an open platform for servers, storage, and networking that can fit in any 19-inch data center rack environment. Its form factor specifications include a brick cage as well as various server bricks, a power shelf, and blind-mate power and data connectors.
