The Open Compute Project this week launched an online marketplace for smaller data center operators aimed at letting them build their facilities according to the specifications of builders of massively scalable data centers such as Facebook Inc. and Microsoft Corp.

The new marketplace allows companies to shop for official OCP hardware, as well as other equipment that’s “inspired” by the specifications and designs of the open-source project. The announcement is a response to the reality that OCP hardware, which is customized for hyperscaler’s workloads to reduce their data center operating costs, has proven difficult for smaller operators to source as they do not buy at the same high volumes.

It appears that the OCP marketplace is the answer to that problem, which is believed to be one of the biggest barriers to adoption of OCP hardware in the enterprise. Another obstacle is the long delivery times for such gear, the OCP said.

The marketplace, which is live now, currently lists about 70 products for sale. However, the range of vendors is still somewhat limited, with just Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., Taiwanese firms Wiwynn Corp. and Edgecore Networks Corp., Japanese systems integrator ITOCHU Techno-Solutions Corp. and American firm Penguin Computing Inc. the only companies offering products.

Of the products currently on sale, only five are OCP-accepted. They are five different data center switches made by EdgeCore, which also lists three OCP-inspired switches based on the 100GbE Wedge 100 switch developed by Facebook. As for HPE, it lists five versions of its popular CloudLine server, which is also OCP-inspired. The CloudLine server lineup is HPE’s commodity hardware offering for hyperscalers.

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