Open19, a community and open standard for enterprise and edge data centre innovation, has unveiled its new brand identity that builds on 6+ years of innovation and reflects a broader vision to advance infrastructure technologies and standards that power our digital world in a sustainable, scalable way. The Open19 project will now exist as one of many future community initiatives under the Sustainable and Scalable Infrastructure Alliance (SSIA).
Additionally, the SSIA announced that Zachary Smith has stepped down as Chairperson of the organisation. Smith has served as Open19’s Chairperson since its inception in 2016 and will remain heavily involved in SSIA projects and community building. My Truong, Field CTO at Equinix has stepped into the Chair position. Truong is deeply involved in the innovation of Open19’s V2 spec that includes a pluggable liquid cooling standard, a 48V native power solution and the ability to support the next generation of rack-level power requirements.
The new SSIA brand and vision reflects the diverse expertise of our community members across the entire tech supply chain, and will open new doors to collaborate and solve big challenges that face our planet and society.
“Today, circular and renewable IT are boardroom concerns as technology advancements and corporate ESG objectives rapidly converge,” said Zac Smith. “Since its founding, Open19 has committed to accelerate the adoption of disruptive power and cooling technologies for workloads that drive towards net zero carbon footprints for the world’s data centre technology. The new SSIA brand and vision reflects the diverse expertise of our community members across the entire tech supply chain, and will open new doors to collaborate and solve big challenges that face our planet and society.”
“Traditionally, data centre technology innovation focused primarily on accelerating computing-related benefits and didn’t consider or pursue sustainability,” said My Truong. “This is changing quickly and we expect the journey that the SSIA is on will be one that every company will need to travel over the next couple of years. There are significant opportunities to accelerate tech innovation while reducing the environmental impact of IT as a good business practise and I’m committed as the SSIA Chairperson to being a part of getting this important mission right.”
In 2021, Open19 joined the Linux Foundation, the world’s largest open-source ecosystem. SSIA is one of many LF sustainability-focused initiatives and communities.
“Sustainability development is a top priority for the Linux Foundation and we have hundreds of active projects in areas including energy infrastructure, carbon accounting, natural resources monitoring and industrial ecology,” said Sean Mcilroy, Programme Manager at the Linux Foundation. “The work the SSIA is doing to help businesses of all sizes scale while reducing environmental harm is making a real impact globally and is giving its members an opportunity to play a direct role in creating open standards for the shift toward increasingly distributed data central models.”
