Author: Dave Berry

Since announcing our involvement in Canonical’s Ubuntu OpenStack Interoperability Lab in November of last year, PMC has also recently joined the OpenPOWER Foundation, an open development community that promotes the collaborative development of hardware and software based on IBM’s next-generation POWER microprocessor architecture.

The traction being gained by the open source movement is evident here. Just as individuals are embracing open source as a chance to participate in a revolution, so are leading companies like Google, Rackspace and even tech companies from China. The promise of cross-company innovation and the ability to influence the direction that the movement will take are opportunities that are too valuable to pass up.

Many of PMC’s strategic partners are OpenPOWER members, including Canonical, Chelsio, Mellanox, Memblaze, Micron, Samsung, and Tyan. Joining the Foundation gives us the opportunity to further integrate PMC’s ecosystem with those of our partners in order to better serve our joint customers.

PMC will also collaborate with other organizations on open source software and advanced storage acceleration technologies.  Along with IBM, Emulex, Qlogic and Mellanox, PMC was a co-sponsor of the new I/O workgroup, for example.  PMC has also joined the system software, hardware architecture, coherent accelerator architecture (CIAA) and open server development platform workgroups (for working group info, log on to http://openpowerfoundation.org/technical/working-groups/).

Our participation in the Foundation will give us access to POWER technologies (such as Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface (CAPI), which greatly accelerates I/O functions in high-speed flash solutions) that can be integrated into PMC products. With that, we’ll be able to deliver more choice, control and flexibility to developers of next-generation hyperscale and cloud data centers that integrate IBM POWER CPUs with PMC Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and/or NVM Express™ (NVMe) products.

It’s going to be an active year in the open source community. Stay tuned for more developments about how PMC is contributing to the ecosystem in an ongoing and meaningful way.