New COO Named for Open Compute Foundation

Cloud industry veteran Cole Crawford has joined the Open Compute Foundation as its chief operating officer. The foundation manages the Open Compute Project (OCP), which was formed more than one year ago to open source data center hardware designs developed by Facebook.

Crawford previously worked for OpenStack and Nebula and advised the Linux Foundation. He started with OCP by volunteering as chair of the storage project, where he led the effort to develop the Open Vault storage server specification.

One of his first tasks in his new role will be to further develop the Open Compute foundation, including growing events such as the upcoming Open Compute Summit, which will be hosted in Santa Clara, California, on January 16-17, 2013.

The Open Compute Foundation board of directors includes Andy Bechtolsheim from Arista Networks, Don Duet from Goldman Sachs, Frank Frankovsky from Facebook, Mark Roenigk from Rackspace. and Jason Waxman from Intel. By releasing Open Compute Project technologies as open hardware, the group's goal is to develop servers and data centers following the model traditionally associated with open source software projects.