Rackspace is cooking up plans to use servers based on IBM's OpenPower chips, as a way to reduce its reliance on the market dominator Intel.

The hosting firm has joined the OpenPower Foundation, an industry alliance developing the market for processors based on IBM's Power architecture, which Big Blue licensed for use in other players' chips in 2013, with the creation of the Foundation, in a bid to make an ARM-style attack on Intel's strangleohold on server processors.

And Rackspace isn't just talking: the firm has been testing OpenPower servers for the last two years, and found “exceptional efficiency and performance benefits” for applications," said IBM infrastructure strategy director Aaron Sullivan.

Open all ours...

Rackspace has a track record in "open" groups, having jointly started the OpenStack initiative for open source cloud software and infrastructure-as-a-service, and enthusiastically adopted the Facebook-led Open Compute Project for white-label open source data center hardware.

Sullivan applauds OpenPower as an addition to this open-source community, majoring on its generic contributions to firmware: “OpenPower brings an increasingly open firmware stack, and deeper access to chips, memory, and storage than anywhere else. This is unprecedented, and it invites the open source community to participate at all layers,” Sullivan said in a statement. “It’s our vision that OpenPower enables OpenStack and Open Compute developers to work all the way down the stack. Where Open Compute opened and revolutionized data center hardware and OpenStack opened up cloud software and infrastructure-as-a-service, OpenPOWER is doing the same for the last black boxes in our servers: chips, buses and firmware.”

However, OpenPower is different in focussing closely on one chip architecture, the Power RISC architecture which IBM developed in the 1980s, and wants to license to third parties.

Other new Foundation members include the Lawrence Livermore and Sandia National Laboratories, Tsinghua University, and the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay.  OpenPOWER also added global technology distributor Avnet to “expose OpenPOWER compatible offerings to a broader range of clients worldwide in variety of industries”, the Foundation said.

“While the open source movement has largely focused on innovations driven by software, we recognize that there is a tremendous opportunity to drive even more exciting technology breakthroughs by fostering open collaboration at all levels of design, including hardware development”, commented Tony Madden, a global supplier business executive with Avnet.

What is OpenPOWER?
The OpenPOWER Foundation is a non-profit industry alliance providing open-source POWER firmware, to control chips using the Power instruction set. The foundation currently has 80 member organizations, and was co-founded by Google, IBM, Mellanox, Nvidia and Tyan in 2013. “The Consortium intends to build advanced server, networking, storage and GPU-acceleration technology aimed at delivering more choice, control and flexibility to developers of next-generation, hyperscale and cloud data centers”, according to the organization’s website.

As DatacenterDynamics previously reported, IBM joined with its co-founders “to go after the System-on-Chip (SoC) server market courted so jealously by Intel, AMD and the likes of Calxeda, AppliedMicro and other licensees of the ARM processor architecture for servers.”

IBM is open-sourcing a software stack for POWER that includes the middleware, a Linux-based operating system, KVM hypervisor, and the OpenStack cloud architecture and management framework, Brad McCredie, an IBM fellow, VP and CTO of the company's Systems Technolgy Group, told us last year.

Like ARM,the chip design iteslf remains company property. “The chip IP is going to be licensed,” he explained. “The open-source IP is licensed as well, but it's an open-source license.”

The first server produced by the consortium came in October of this year. Power System S824L was a partnership between Foundation co-founders, and the server included IBM’s Power8 processors, with GPUs from Nvidia.

Drew Amosori contributed to this report.