QLogic, a Fibre Channel adapter vendor has designed an adapter specifically for use in Open Compute Project (OCP) servers.

OCP is a non-profit open source hardware and data center design initiative started by Facebook in 2011. The organization is holding a summit today in Santa Clara, California.

QLOgic's new OCP part is the QOE2562 8Gb Fibre Channel mezzanine adapter. It is available with the STRATOS S215-X1M2Z server made by Quanta QCT using OCP design specs.

The adapters are expected to be available through other vendors and QLogic partners in April.

Quanta general manager Mike Yang said there was a growing number of customers with Fibre Channel infrastructure who wanted to use Open Compute hardware. “The partnership with QLogic allows us to provide secure, reliable Fibre Channel solutions that reduce energy consumption and maximize data center efficiency with Open Compute,” he said.

Since its founding, OCP has released server, storage and data center rack design specs. The contributed designs are primarily Facebooks, which has also contributed some data center cooling and electrical infrastructure designs.

The project has gained a lot of momentum over the past several years, vendors like Quanta and Wywinn releasing off-the-shelf hardware designed to OCP specs, and Rackspace, a major cloud infrastructure services provider, committing to using OCP hardware only to support its services.

On Monday, Microsoft became the second web-scale data center operator to join open compute and contribute its server designs to the open source initiative.