LinkedIn’s Open19 rack specification is ready for production early in 2017, the company’s head of global infrastructure architecture Yuval Bachar told us at the DCD Zettastructure event in London. 

The architecture, launched at DCD’s Webscale event in San Jose in July  is up and running in LinkedIn’s labs, with open switches and open software and will be in production “in the next couple of quarters”, Bachar told us. 

There are two other things to watch for, according to this interview. Firstly, a consortium will be established to manage the Open19 architecture, and secondly, as LinkedIn becomes a Microsoft subsidiary, Microsoft hardware initiatives will be applied within Open19. 

“We’re looking at ways to collaborate between the Olympus project and the Open19 project,” said Bachar, ” to leverage their motherboards into our Open19 environment.”