LinkedIn recently announced Open19 Foundation, a community that’s working towards
the standardization of data centers and edge computing solutions.
Though Open19 Foundation was announced only last week, it’s been an ambitious project
for LinkedIn. For the last couple of years, the company has been working towards defining
a new open standard for servers based on a common form factor. This internal project was
named as Open19 since it tries to standardize the 19-inch rack.
The key goals of the Open19 project were to provide lower cost per rack, lower cost per server,
optimized power utilization, and an open standard for OEMs and hardware vendors to
contribute to and participate in. Open19 defined the form factor, power distribution, and
network connectivity to servers, storage, and other elements in the data center that can fit
within a 2RU size or smaller.
