Huawei becomes a platinum member, only the second telecoms equipment vendor to join the OCP: Nokia has been a platinum member since 2015, but Ericsson and ZTE remain outside the initiative. Cisco is in the third rank, a silver member.
“Huawei will play an important role in the adoption of open and efficient cloud hardware around the globe, and can help us build a collaborative community across China,” said Bill Carter, CTO of the OCP.
Facebook started the OCP in 2011 in order to apply the benefits of open source to hardware and with the aim of rapidly increasing the pace of data-centre innovation. It has focused around open source contributions for networking, servers, storage and Open Rack.
Qiu Long, president of Huawei’s intelligent computing product line, said: “The ever growing application of cloud computing, big data and artificial intelligence increases the demand for computing resources in the data centre and edge computing scenarios. As a result, traditional compute architecture faces increasing deployment, management and energy efficiency challenges.”
Only three carriers – AT&T, Deutsche Telekom and Verizon – are platinum members, and SK Telecom is a gold member.
Hyperscale companies Alibaba, Google, Microsoft and Tencent are in the top category. Fidelity – which owns Colt – and Goldman Sachs are among investors that are members.
