10 April 2017

Volta will house the facility at its London data centre in Clerkenwell.

Europe’s first Open Lab will be launched in London to accelerate the adoption of Open hardware and software for companies in Europe.

The facility is aimed at organisations needing to plan a migration to super-efficient and highly cost effective open compute and open stack technologies, as first pioneered by the Open Compute Project (OCP).

Service providers and enterprises will be able to deploy and test their compute workloads on OCP-approved hardware and software, in a controlled, independent and collaborative environment.

Volta Data Centres will house the lab at its London facility in Clerkenwell. The facility will be built and operated by CSsquared, an open stack and open hardware integrator. It will use 1U, 2U and 4U open compute servers, HPC servers, JBOD/JBOF storage devices, and bare metal Ethernet switches.

It’s claimed the lab will bring together all the “major players in the open world”, including Canonical, Redhat, Cumulus, QCT, Wiwynn, EdgeCore Networks, amongst others.

Users will be able to evaluate the performance of Open hardware running Open Stack software; migrate, validate and certify applications and workloads into an Open Stack environment running on Open hardware; and develop and refine software-based outcomes.

Open data centre initiatives have been mostly taking place in North America, but this is the first of its kind in Europe. CSsquared MD Keith Sullivan says: “Our vision is to bring the huge benefits of the open compute ecosystem – conclusively proven in the hyperscale environment – within reach of European organisations.

“It’s new and that can be a bit scary, especially if you’ve committed to the world view of one of the traditional hardware vendors. We’re here to help organisation prove the benefits for themselves, and then to make a planned, insight-driven migration to the ‘world of open’.”