Red Hat Joins the OpenPOWER Foundation, adds open source leadership and expertise to community-driven hardware innovation

As part of our commitment to delivering open technologies across many computing architectures, today Red Hat has joined the OpenPOWER Foundation, an open development community based on the POWER microprocessor architecture, at the Platinum level. While we already do build and support open technologies for the POWER architecture, the OpenPOWER Foundation is committed to an open, community-driven technology-creation process - something that we feel is critical to the continued growth of open collaboration around POWER.

As a participant in the OpenPOWER community and a member of the Board of Directors (where we are currently represented by Scott Herold), we plan to focus on helping to create open source software for POWER-based architectures, offering more choice, control and flexibility to developers working on hyperscale and cloud-based data centers. Additionally, we’re excited to work with other technology leaders on advanced server, networking, storage and I/O acceleration technologies, all built on a set of common, open standards.

We feel that open standards, like those being utilized by OpenPOWER, are critical to enterprise IT innovation, offering a common set of guidelines for the integration, implementation and security of new technologies. Modern standards bodies such as OpenPOWER and others seek to democratize guidelines across a broad, inclusive community, focusing on agility and providing a common ground for emerging technology. Red Hat is a strong proponent of open standards across the technology stack, participating in groups that cover the emerging software (OCI, CNCF) as well as hardware (CCIX, GenZ) stacks.

The development efforts of the OpenPOWER Foundation benefit many partners that we already work with, and we look forward to increased collaboration in an open, transparent environment. We’re also looking to support many other emerging technical areas of the community. These include machine learning and artificial intelligence, data platforms and analytics, as well as cloud and container deployments.

We’re pleased to be a part of OpenPOWER, and look forward to helping craft community-driven collaborative designs that broaden customer technology choices across the breadth of enterprise IT.

From our partners

Scot Schultz, Director, HPC and Technical Computing, Mellanox

“As the technology stack becomes increasingly more complex, deploying virtual machines, cloud services and bare metal technologies must all interact simultaneously. It’s critical that we have a foundational set of standards that seamlessly work across hardware architectures. The OpenPOWER Foundation helps to set these standards for POWER systems, and Red Hat is an excellent addition to the Foundation’s leadership, both as a partner and for their extensive work in developing community-driven standards.”

Ken King, general manager, OpenPOWER, IBM

“The development model of the OpenPOWER Foundation is one that elicits collaboration and represents a new way in exploiting and innovating around processor technology. POWER architecture is well tailored for many traditional and new applications, enabling OpenPOWER Foundation members like Red Hat to add their own innovations on top of the hardware technologies or create new solutions that capitalize on emerging workloads such as cognitive applications like AI and deep learning.”