Three European companies opened the first European Open Compute Project (OCP) Experience Center. The three companies — Circle B, Rittal, and Switch Datacenters — will operate the OCP environment at one of the three facilities that Switch Datacenters operates in the Amsterdam area.

The OCP Experience Center will be available for testing new and proposed OCP technologies and for conducting demonstrations of open OCP hardware designs.

Circle B is one of the first European channel partners that has acquired the status of OCP Solution Provider, a designation for companies that develop ready-made systems based on OCP designs. Rittal manufactures data center racks and cooling systems that are based on OCP designs. And Switch Datacenters is a carrier-neutral data center operator in The Netherlands. The company is currently building a new data center in Amsterdam based on OCP principles.

The three companies have determined that IT managers at large enterprises and governments in Europe have yet to adopt OCP principles on a large scale. They’ve established the European OCP Experience Center to help IT managers and data center managers fully understand the impact of OCP designs. The center will also allow them to test specific OCP-based solutions that are relevant to their IT environments.

The opening of the center coincides with the first annual OCP regional summit in Amsterdam this week.

Probably the biggest news coming out of the regional summit is that AT&T released detailed specifications to OCP for a cell site white box gateway router. The white box blueprint is a reference design that any hardware maker can use as a guide to build these routers.

In other news, China-based Inspur donated some new server configurations to OCP. And Huawei joined OCP as a platinum member.

Photo Copyright: 123rf