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Huawei to deploy Open Rack in all its public cloud data centres
Sat, 16th Mar 2019
FYI, this story is more than a year old

Tech giant Huawei has unveiled plans to adopt Open Rack in its new public cloud data centers across the globe.

The Open Rack initiative proposed by the Open Compute Project (OCP) seeks to redefine the data center rack and Huawei is confident it is one of the more promising developments in the scale computing environment.

Huawei's decision to go with Open Rack is hoped to enhance the environmental sustainability of the company's new public cloud data centers by using less energy for servers while driving operational efficiency by reducing the time it takes to install and maintain racks.

The Open Rack initiative is the first rack standard that is designed for data centers, integrating the rack into the data center infrastructure, which OCP Foundation chief technology officer Bill Carter says is a holistic design process that considers the interdependence of everything from the power grid to the gates in the chips on each motherboard.

It has already been adoption by some of the world's largest hyperscale operators, including Facebook, Microsoft, and Google.

"Huawei's engineering and business leaders recognised the efficiency and flexibility that Open Rack offers, and the support that is available from a global supplier base,” says Carter.

“Providing cloud services to a global customer base creates certain challenges. The flexibility of the Open Rack specification and the ability to adapt for liquid cooling allows Huawei to service new geographies. Huawei's decision to choose Open Rack is a great endorsement!"

Huawei has announced that it is also expanding its work with the OCP Community to extend the design of the standard and further improve time-to-market, and high serviceability and reduce TCO.

Last year Huawei became an OCP Platinum Member, and this year the company plans to continue its investment into the initiative, including on-going participation and contributions for various OCP projects such as Rack and Power, System Management and Server projects with underlying contributions to the upcoming specs for OCP accelerator Module, Advanced Cooling Solutions and OpenRMC.

"Huawei's strategic investment and commitment to OCP is a win-win," says Huawei Intelligent Computing Business Department FusionServer general manager Kenneth Zhang.

"Combining Huawei's extensive experience in Telco and Cloud deployments together with the knowledge of the vast OCP community will help Huawei to provide cutting edge, flexible and open solutions to its global customers. In turn, Huawei can leverage its market leadership and global data center infrastructure to help introduce OCP to new geographies and new market segments worldwide."