Open Compute Project is an ambitious project that was born at Facebook to break the hardware vendor lock-in. It was started by Jonathan Heiliger to redesign the company’s datacenter in Oregon.

The project picked up momentum and emerged as ‘Open Compute Project’ that was backed by veterans including Intel, Rackspace, Goldman Sachs and Andy Bechtolsheim.

“In designing commodity hardware that is more efficient, flexible, and scalable, we’re redefining tech infrastructure. Together, we’re throwing off the shackles of proprietary, one-size-fits-all gear” – OCP mission statement.

Today even giants like AT&T are moving to commodity hardware and software defined solutions to build future networks. As we are moving towards a fully open source and software driven world OCP is more critical than ever. OCP has joined hands with the Linux Foundation to further the development of software and hardware based open source networking.

The two organizations will work together to create stronger integration and testing, new open networking features, more scalability, a reduction in CAPEX/OPEX, greater harmonization with switch network operating systems, and increased interoperability for network functions virtualization (NFV) network transformation.

Virtualization of network functions and the resulting disaggregation of hardware and software have created interest in open source at both layers. OCP provides an open source option for the hardware layer, and The Linux Foundation’s OPNFV project integrates OCP along with other open source software projects into relevant NFV reference architectures.

“Given this alignment, OCP and OPNFV already have been collaborating on activities such as plugfests and joint demos. Now they have committed to expanded collaborative efforts,” said the Linux Foundation.