OpenPower Models (Photo : http://www.ibm.com/)
Cloud computing giant Rackspace just became the 80th member of the IBM's OpenPOWER Foundation, which is now on its second year on operations.
The San Antonio-based data firm has been collaborating quietly with the foundation for nearly a year and a half, and is now announcing its cooperation. Rackspace is also planning to construct a computing platform based on the OpenPower technology and will be within the requirements for the Open Compute Project (OCP) and will utilize the services of OpenStack, which Rackspace co-founded with another firm.
The OpenPower Foundation was just launched in 2013 by IBM and other several tech firms. The group's number rapidly increased, with tech giants such as ZTE, Hitachi Nvidia, Samsung and Google joining the group.
Officials from Rackspace said that they are now turning to open-sourced technologies as it is continually making improvements on the efficiency and performance of tis data hubs.
According to Rackspace engineer and senior director Aaron Sullivan, OpenPower can open the way to better understand and utilize more areas such as firmware and processors.
"We'll need to start moving into chips, memory, and storage," wrote Sullivan in the company's blog post.
Sullivan added that OpenPower delivers better access to storage, memory and chips than anywhere else and called the innovation "unprecedented." He also urged open-source developers to join and help improve OpenPower.
Sullivan dismissed rumors that it was abandoning Intel, but it is just adding another type of architecture.
Intel, which currently has over 95 percent worth of shares in the market, is dominating with its Xeon and Atom platforms.
However, web-based giants such as Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook and Google are looking for data server technologies that are power-efficient and high-performing at the same time.
Rackspace, which was a former web-hosting firm, is aiming to compete with other cloud service giants.
