Equinix, Inc. has announced that it has incorporated technology designed by Facebook and available from the Open Compute Project (OCP) to help develop an open source ecosystem inside Equinix International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) data centers. As part of this announcement Equinix and Facebook will collaborate on technology innovation to build a diverse, open source platform for both software and hardware. Building on contributions to OCP, this ecosystem will be built on a new, open source architecture that will enable faster innovation, and create greater efficiency in data center and hybrid cloud deployments. To facilitate this ecosystem, Wedge open source switches, developed by Facebook and contributed to OCP, will be part of the new architecture inside Equinix. By working with Facebook to build this ecosystem, Equinix is able to provide its enterprise customers with an optimal environment to push technology boundaries and develop next-generation interconnection solutions.

"We are thrilled to be working in close partnership with Facebook as we bring a new level of innovation and collaboration to our growing customer base. By working together, we can drive technology evolution for interconnection by defining the next-generation architecture for the network and cloud edge, thus ensuring our customers have the scale and performance they require for newly evolving platforms and applications," said Ihab Tarazi, CTO, Equinix.

Many industry trends are driving the need for the massive scaling and performance increases provided by open source hardware and software. For example, the industry is rapidly moving toward a more software-centric model, wireless capacity for 5G is currently limited, and there is an explosion of devices that require massive scaling. OCP and the resulting ecosystem forming inside Equinix will provide the scale and performance to further drive these innovations and trends through interconnection. As a result, customers will have an open source hardware and software platform to deploy their mobile, Internet of Things (IoT) and hybrid cloud deployments in a cost-effective manner.

"The OCP community works best when there is strong collaboration between companies, and that's why I think the work on this open architecture for software and hardware is so important. I look forward to seeing how the use of OCP technology like Wedge open network switches helps Equinix better meet the needs of enterprises," said Jason Taylor, chairman and president of the Open Compute Project Foundation, and VP of Infrastructure, Facebook.

The open source platform will provide an environment for true innovation across hardware and software, and enables access to the dense ecosystem of networks and cloud service providers inside Equinix data centers. Equinix is home to more than 1,100 network providers, as well as 500-plus cloud service providers, which gives customers a broad choice of providers in any of Equinix's 40 global markets. In total, Platform Equinix hosts more than 6,300 customers, each of them potential customers or partners in developing new solutions or new routes into untapped markets.

This open source platform will be powered by the Mesosphere Datacenter Operating System (DCOS), which is based on the proven Apache Mesos architecture that is used in production today, at very large scale, by some of the world's biggest and most innovative companies. DCOS is an ideal fit for Open Compute equipment because it aggregates all data center resources into a single pool; automatically schedules workloads wherever they can fit; and simplifies the process of managing complex systems such as Apache Spark, Apache Kafka and HDFS. This approach increases utilization and slashes energy bills, while also improving both development and operational efficiency. Placing DCOS in Equinix data centers will help users achieve their goals around hybrid cloud environments and IoT program applications, by enabling them to build their application infrastructure once and deploy it anywhere.

Equinix recently joined the OCP Telco Project along with several leading network providers. Since it was founded five years ago, OCP has brought new levels of openness to data center technology, and momentum is continuing to build around open source contributions for networking, servers, storage, and Open Rack.

The Open Compute Project has been proven to reduce costs and provide a catalyst for innovation. In fact, Facebook has saved their company billions since their work on OCP began.

This article was originally posted “Equinix Leverages OCP Technology To Develop Open Source Ecosystem” from Cloud Strategy Magazine.