About 500 participants converged on Rackspace's San Antonio headquarters to hear the latest news and developments from the Open Compute Project at its third gathering. The goal of Open Compute is to open source and standardize hardware designs, enhancing mega-scale computing and increasing hardware efficiencies. Yet the standardization of hardware, with a focus on servers, storage and the data center, has potential ripple effects throughout the ecosystem.
"We want to be fast followers," stated Keith Shinn of financial services provider, Fidelity, who was on a panel with suppliers and end users.
Between the members of the project, vendors and suppliers, the event was filled with the "who's who" of the hardware, cloud and data center worlds.
On hand in the expo space were: Samsung, Kingston Technology, Data Direct Networks, Dell, Quanta (which announced new US cloud solutions provider QCT), Rosendin Electric, Intel, Rackspace, Hyve Solutions, ZT Systems, Mellanox Technologies, Nebula, Qlogic, OpenStack (a related open source cloud software project), HP and AMD.