OpenPOWER Members Bring Rackspace-Led Open Compute Barreleye Server to Market

By Sam Ponedal, Social Strategist, OpenPOWER Foundation

Back in March, we told you about how OpenPOWER members StackVelocity, Mark III Systems, and Penguin Computing had adopted Rackspace’s Barreleye server design. Today,we are pleased to relay the news from IBM Edge that our members have reached the next milestone in their journey, and have released their Barreleye server designs. Let’s take a look at all the Barreleye news from our members:

Rackspace

Originally published on Rackspace.com by Aaron Sullivan

Barreleye is available from multiple outlets, to suit many kinds of consumers. From solution providers who specialize in hyperscale, to high performance computing, to the IBM business partner network, you can purchase Barreleye from a company that understands your business.

Barreleye works with a variety of Linux distributions and KVM hypervisors. It has chassis options for those who like to keep their storage high capacity, in-box and powerful, or light-weight and low-cost. It is configurable for basic low-cost networking, or very high-throughput networking. And for a server with such a low mechanical profile, it has great PCI adapter capacity.

If you want to test drive it, but don’t have an Open Rack handy, there’s a simple-to-use benchtop power supply (called Lunchbox) we developed along with Barreleye. Here are a few other things that Barreleye does:

• Leverages one of the most powerful 2-socket servers on the planet.
• Gets your organization closer to the cutting edge of open hardware development.
• Makes a clear statement to your suppliers: you expect more freedom, value and influence.

Mark III Systems

Originally published on markiiisys.com by Andy Lin

Today at IBM Edge 2016, Mark III and our partners in the OpenPOWER Foundation are announcing the immediate availability of an OpenPOWER server platform based on the Barreleye Open Compute Project (OCP) design.

We’re doing this announcement specifically in partnership with Penguin Computing under the OCP-compatible model of the Penguin Magna 1015, which provides an enterprise supported version of the Barreleye system.  As a long-time IBM Premier Business Partner with two decades of experience with POWER, our strong team of engineers are also available to offer their expertise and services around the Magna 1015 platform to ensure that our joint OpenPOWER clients are successful.

If you might recall, Barreleye is based on the Rackspace-led OCP design that incorporates OpenPOWER technologies (including POWER8 processors), and was a system that Mark III announced back in March at the OCP Summit that it would be offering very soon.

We view the Magna 1015 (Barreleye) as fitting a key niche in our portfolio of OpenPOWER platforms, as many hyperscale users of compute have looked at or are starting to look at OCP approaches to maximizing datacenter efficiency as they grow.

As a member of both foundations, we’re very excited about the future of both OpenPOWER and OCP in delivering highly efficient architectures for the bandwidth-intensive workloads of the next decade.  To us, Barreleye is the culmination of both these industry movements, but is also just the beginning of a new wave of innovation.

Penguin Computing

Originally published on penguincomputing.com

Penguin Computing, a provider of high performance computing, enterprise data center and cloud solutions, today announced immediate availability of Penguin Magna 1015, an OpenPOWER based system for cloud and hyperscale data center environments.

Based on the “Barreleye” platform design pioneered by Rackspace and promoted by the OpenPOWER Foundation and the Open Compute Project (OCP) Foundation, Penguin Magna 1015 targets memory and I/O intensive workloads, including high density virtualization and data analytics. The Magna 1015 system uses the Open Rack physical infrastructure defined by the OCP Foundation and adopted by the largest hyperscale data centers, providing operational cost savings from the shared power infrastructure and improved serviceability.

“Penguin is all about open technologies and offering choice of platforms for the customer application”, said Jussi Kukkonen, Director, Product Management, Penguin Computing. “Penguin’s partnership with Mark III provides our customers with a unique combination of comprehensive OCP server, storage and networking catalog together with OpenPOWER architecture and applications expertise.”

“As a fellow member of the OpenPOWER Foundation, Mark III is excited to be working with Penguin Computing on OCP solutions enabled with OpenPOWER technologies,” said Andy Lin, Vice President of Strategy, Mark III Systems. “We believe that an OCP compatible system powered by OpenPOWER processors presents a truly unique value proposition for hyperscale users of compute looking for a differentiated platform to efficiently run and scale high-bandwidth workloads, including big data analytics, HPC, and cloud.”

StackVelocity

Originally published on go.stackvelocity.com by Doug Taylor

The Open Power Foundation (OPF) stands to become a significant complement to OCP. The IBM POWER architecture, which is well known in the industry as the performance leader, has moved to an open licensing model. Through the OPF, an ecosystem of chip companies, board manufacturers, networking vendors, etc., are all driving innovation to create the next generation of Web 2.0 compute platforms that are open.

As testament to how well OPF and OCP foundations work together, Doug Balog, General Manager for POWER Systems at IBM, announced today at the IBM EDGE event that Barreleye is ready for mass production and available for purchase. Barreleye is a powerful and highly efficient server built with OpenPOWERTM technologies and delivered through the Open Compute Foundation. StackVelocity is excited to be collaborating with the Open community by bringing Barreleye to market.

StackVelocity is able to complement the performance of OpenPOWER with our very own high-density OCP storage platform called HatTrick Storage. The HatTrick Storage platform delivers up to 15 LFF drives in the same form factor as a “Winterfell/Leopard” server, allowing up to 45 LFF drives in 2 OU—that’s a 50% increase in density over the currently available solutions. It provides substantial capacity in an extremely efficient footprint and can be configured to match any workload.

For those customers that also need a standard EIA 19” OpenPOWER solution, we have a high-performance platform called Saba that features OpenPOWER Power8TM processors to tackle the challenge of extracting value from mass amounts of information. Saba can support up to 1TB of memory and 24 SFF drives. This means massive amounts of information are brought to compute resources in real time and business insight is maximized.

These building blocks provide the core from which we can help our customers tailor OpenPOWER solutions that fit their unique business needs.