The world’s largest tech companies are known for competing aggressively against one another in their efforts to win over customers, but they’re also known to collaborate when it suits them, such as when it comes to making data centers easier to manage.

That explains why Microsoft Corp.-owned LinkedIn, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., and General Electric Digital are banding together to form a new foundation that aims to make it easier for enterprises to buy hardware for their data centers.

The group is called the Open19 Foundation, and will try to encourage companies to build their data centers in a more uniform fashion, so it fits nicely into standardized data center racks, which are used to house equipment such as servers and routers. The most common size is the 19-inch rack, hence Open19 wants to standardize on this.

“The Open19 Platform represents a simple solution for a complex problem, so it’s no surprise that the response from the community has been so strong,” Yuval Bachar, president of the Open19 Foundation and principal engineer for global infrastructure architecture and strategy at LinkedIn, said in a statement. “With the formation of the foundation, and the addition of our new partners, we can now begin capitalizing on this interest from the community and building on the vision for the Open19 open platform.”

If Open19 sounds similar to Facebook Inc.’s Open Compute Project, that’s because it is. Like Open19, the OCP also emphasizes disaggregated systems, standardized rack sizes and modular components. But the OCP is largely aimed at the world’s biggest Internet companies – hyperscalers – that operate multiple data centers across the world. In contrast, Open19 is catering to the little guys as well, focused on optimizing data centers of all sizes, in any location.

Interestingly, Microsoft, one of the OCP’s main backers, is now a participant in both projects thanks to its acquisition of LinkedIn last year. Both Microsoft and LinkedIn continue to operate their own data centers, so playing a part in both initiatives makes sense.

The foundation said one of its first contributions is LinkedIn’s 19-inch industry specification, which defines “a cross-industry common server form factor using racks, cages and pre-defined network and power, creating a flexible and economical data center and edge solution for operators of all sizes,” Open19 said in a statement.

A new standard for IoT and edge computing?

Open19’s founding members include two companies that are pushing a new kind of distributed information technology infrastructure to support applications at the network edge, including Internet of Things devices and autonomous cars.

GE Digital said the foundation’s specifications will become an important component for standardizing deployments on its Predix IoT software management platform.

“As a leader in the Industrial IoT, GE sees a need to establish a set of standards and customizable, flexible and economical data center designs, which will ultimately help our industrial customers capitalize on the latest advances in computing,” Darren Haas, head of Predix Cloud Engineering at GE Digital, said in a statement. “One of the benefits we see from supporting Open19 is that it allows us to drive future solutions that are optimized for industrial use cases while taking advantage of an open architecture.”

A second company that’s focused on network edge infrastructure is Vapor IO Inc., which offers a platform for wireless network operators that’s designed to enable rapid deployment of edge capacity.

“Open19 is the rack standard we’ve needed for a decade,” said Cole Crawford, chief executive officer of Vapor IO and former executive director of the OCP from 2013 to 2015. ““With Open19, we can snap together Tower Edge Compute data centers like Lego bricks. We can send a crew out to an edge environment, such as at the base of a cell tower, and stand up a new data center in minutes.”

Open19 said its production hardware designs are currently under development. The foundation said it’s actively seeking new members to contribute to its project, including companies, individuals and industry partners.

Images: Open19 Foundation