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Google and Rackspace co-develop open server architecture based on new IBM POWER9 hardware

April 6, 2016
Maire Mahony

Hardware Engineering Manager at Google, Director, OpenPOWER Foundation

Rethinking data center design is happening out in the open here at Google. Today we're announcing that we’re working with Rackspace to co-develop an open server architecture design specification based on IBM’s new POWER9 CPU.

We also recently joined the Open Compute Project (OCP) and hope to submit this work to the OCP community. In fact, the POWER9 data center server specification is designed to fit in the proposed 48V open rack that we're co-designing with Facebook.

We’ve been working on OpenPOWER since 2014, when we helped found the OpenPOWER Foundation and we’re now POWER-ready. This means the architecture is fully supported across our toolchain, allowing developers to target apps to POWER with a simple flag.

It won’t surprise anyone to hear that demand for compute at Google has been relentless and it isn’t slowing down any time soon. We’ve found 60 trillion web addresses so far, versus one trillion in 2008. To meet that demand, our goal is to ensure our fleet is capable of handling ISA heterogeneity, to achieve best-in-class performance and value.

We're committed to open innovation and to optimizing performance and cost in data centers, and look forward to passing these savings along to our internal users as well as our Google Cloud Platform customers.

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