The Facebook-led Open Compute Project (OCP) has stepped up its embrace of popular software platforms, including the latest release of OpenStack, container orchestration tools like Kubernetes, plus several other Big Data and block storage approaches that run on everything from containers to hybrid clouds.

Facebook announced the opening this week of a new OCP hardware lab in Menlo Park, CA, which is set up to validate and certify enterprise platforms like OpenStack Mitaka and others.

The OCP was established by Facebook, along with Intel and Rackspace Hosting, Inc. back in 2011 as a way to standardize open-source hardware development in the data center. One of the main aims of the organizations is to ensure OCP hardware is compatible with popular platforms like OpenStack.

In a blog post, Facebook said that Canonical Ltd. and Red Hat Inc. became the first two vendors to validate their infrastructure software on OCP hardware components such as dual-socket Leopard servers, Honey Badger storage platforms and Knox JBOD’s (just a bunch of drives). Facebook said the validation tests were designed to spot any “compatibility challenges,” adding that both company’s platforms passed the test with flying colors.

The announcement comes just days after Red Hat announced the release of its OpenStack Platform 9 based on OpenStack Mitaka, which in turn was released in April with new features designed to help cloud scale out. Red Hat’s take on the platform integrates Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7.2, Ceph Storage 2, and CloudForm’s, which is Red Hat’s solution for monitoring hybrid clouds.

“We continue to add capabilities to meet the production requirements of enterprises rolling our private clouds and service providers deploying network functions virtualization,” said Radhesh Balakrishnan, Red Hat’s OpenStack general manager, in a statement.

Red Hat said it’s also validated its Gluster storage and Ansible DevOps and IT automation tools on the OCP’s hardware platforms.

As for Canonical, its Juju service-modeling application for configuring and managing Kubernetes, OpenStack, and Big Data software was also validated on the OCP’s hardware. The company also tested its new “metal-as-a-service” (MaaS) solution for automating data center servers and networks.

Juju is capable of installing what Facebook called “big software” including Kubernetes, OpenStack and other solutions with complex architectures. Juju operates at the “service level,” which means that services run independently of the underlying infrastructure. Canonical said that by combining Juju with MaaS, users could speed up the deployment or redeployment of Hadoop and other workloads onto bare metal as easily as deploying them in the cloud.

Canonical also validated its Ubuntu storage platform on OCP hardware, it said in a statement.

In its blog post, Facebook stressed the need for compatibility testing in order to address the concerns of skeptics, some of whom remain unconvinced that it’s possible to run commercial software on customized, open-source hardware.

“The community needs a systematic way to know whether the hardware and software they planned to use would be compatible — since they likely weren’t developed in tandem or by the same company for a similar workload,” Facebook’s Michael Liberte insisted.

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