Availability of Open Compute Project solutions aligned for expected growth in Europe
Amsterdam, 17 May 2019 – Taurus Group and Circle B have joined forces to accelerate the delivery of Open Compute Project (OCP) solutions by increasing the capacity of production, inventory and expansion of the distribution channel for the European market. Open source-based solutions are growing in interest and are expected to reach 59% CAGR by 2020 in the EMEA region according to IHS Markit research organisation. Through OCP solutions, a more sustainable and efficient IT Infrastructure will result in substantial TCO, Capex and Opex benefits.
These cutting-edge solutions were initially created from a collective need to move away from standard market systems to create a highly adjustable solutions. Following development by leading companies such as Facebook, Intel, Microsoft and Rackspace, a wider adoption of OCP has been picked up by many other organisations. For years, hyper-scalers have greatly benefitted from these innovations. Now Taurus Group and Circle B are making these innovative OCP solutions readily available for organisations with smaller infrastructures such as private, co-location and edge data centres.
Peter Ludzenieks, Taurus Data Center Director: “Taurus Group is very passionate about Sustainability, Innovation, and Collaboration. Therefore, we see a great match with Circle B and the Open Compute Project Foundation. We envision that our collaboration can bring great value to the market by streamlining distribution channels, accelerating delivery times, reducing IT infrastructure Total Costs of Ownership (TCO), and the most importantly, contributing to a more sustainable environment”.
Menno Kortekaas, Founder and CTO of Circle B: “We are very excited about joining Taurus Group, who enables acceleration in providing to the customers highly-efficient OCP hardware, solutions, services and products.”
Jan Hoogstrate, director of the Free ICT Europe Foundation: “The disrupting elements of OCP are the removal of vendor lock-in, the modularity that results in upgradeability and an open maintenance concept. These are all important for an open Circular Economy. With the joining of forces, we foresee a much wider adoption both within the IT channel as with end-users.”
Steve Helvie, VP of Channel Development – OCP: “It’s great to see Circle B and the Taurus Group teaming up to deliver OCP solutions across Europe. As the market for OCP continues to grow, we see more requirements for integrated solutions across compute and storage that extends to the software application layer. This new combination of Circle B and Taurus makes them well positioned to help meet the next wave of OCP demand.”
About Taurus Group
Taurus was founded in 2005 and became a conglomerate of value-added IT distribution and system integration companies with offices in The Netherlands (HQ), Belgium (2BY2 NV), and Germany (Taurus Europe GmbH). It has built a strong global distribution infrastructure with large on-hand inventories of components, particularly enterprise storage. In addition, Taurus Group has its own enterprise integration division (ClusTaur Solutions BV) that offers software-defined datacentre solutions such as ultra-low latency Software Defined Storage (SDS). To provide even more value to the market, Taurus Group is continuing to bring additional expertise into their ecosystem. Recently, Taurus acquired High-Performance Computing specialist ClusterVision BV, and completed the acquisition of Dutch company Circle B BV, adding Open Compute Project solutions and Software Defined Networking (SDN) to its offering.
About Circle B:
Circle B is a well-established Dutch company whose core business is promoting the adoption of highly efficient and innovative data center and edge infrastructures. For many years Circle B has been focusing on the Open Compute Project (OCP) hardware and networking software that enables Software Defined Networking (SDN) capability. In June 2018, the Open Compute Project Foundation appointed Circle B as its first “OCP Solution Provider” headquartered in the European market.
About the Open Compute Project Foundation:
In 2011, Facebook shared its designs with the public and—along with Intel and Rackspace, Goldman Sachs and Andy Bechtolsheim—launched the Open Compute Project and incorporated the Open Compute Project Foundation. The five members hoped to create a movement in the hardware space that would bring about the same kind of creativity and collaboration we see in open source software. And that’s exactly what’s happening.