The Linux Foundation's Open19 project has rebranded as the Sustainable and Scalable Infrastructure Alliance (SSIA) in a move to address the growing presence of sustainability challenges in the data center and IT infrastructure industries. The newly-dubbed SSIA also shared Chairperson Zac Smith's plans to step down from the post he has held since 2016, with Equinix Field CTO My Truong taking his place.

According to Truong, the current technology landscape boasts significant opportunities to innovate while "reducing the environmental impact of IT as a good business practice," he said. "I'm committed as the SSIA chairperson to being a part of getting this important mission right."

Smith plans to remain "heavily involved" in SSIA as a board member and was part of the process to change the face of Open19 – an open-source project focused on developing a community-driven framework that approaches complex issues like sustainability and open standards within "one part of the digital infrastructure landscape," Smith told SDxCentral.

"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 center technology," Smith said. The project's open standard aims to fit any 19-inch server, storage or networking rack.

During the last year, Smith has seen increased demand from the Open19 community and the broader data center industry for "global-scale approaches to sustainability challenges in the data center," like energy consumption or water use. Given this elevated interest, the organization realized it could increase its impact "by renaming our umbrella project to the SSIA" and "empowering our community to expand into additional working groups and projects that are critically important and require the same open community-driven approach," he said.

To that point, the new SSIA branding "reflects the diverse expertise" of its community and should "open new doors to collaborate and solve big challenges that face our planet and society."

While most boardrooms are concerned with circular and renewable IT infrastructure as technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) advance and corporate environmental commitment deadlines grow closer, Smith also noted a sense of boardroom confusion in terms of where to invest.

"With the dynamic industry changes around us, varying priorities and global vendors and service providers, most organizations struggle to put together a plan and execute towards their sustainability and circularity goals," he said.

To that point, SSIA prioritizes aligning adoptable best practices across the different players in the IT infrastructure value chain (suppliers, data center operators, end users, etc.) to allow more companies to "take advantage of the technology innovation in more sustainable infrastructure."

While the organization's name is changing and its scope is expanding, the team remains committed to the Open19 project and will continue rolling out and encouraging adoption of its new v2 specification. The project's v1 spec is currently used "across the world," including in Equinix's digital services portfolio.

The project is still developing offerings around the v2 spec, but it has "tremendous early interest from both end users and suppliers," Smith said. "We're excited to see offerings come to market in the coming quarters."

SSIA also plans to simultaneously "work as a community to incubate additional projects as our members desire."