Circle B and Rittal Chose New Location of OCP Experience Center

Circle B and Rittal have decided to move the first European Open Compute Project (OCP) Experience Center to the maincubes AMS01 datacenter in Amsterdam. The OCP Experience Center was initially located at Switch Datacenters AMS1 in Amsterdam.

“The reason to move the experience center to a new location is the fact that Switch Datacenters recently sold off its AMS1 site,“ states Andre Hiddink, Product Manager IT-Infrastructure RiMatrix at Rittal B.V. Netherlands. “The first European OCP Experience Center has been a huge success and we have welcomed a large number of highly interested datacenter managers and datacenter professionals to our facility,“ says Menno Kortekaas, Chief Technology Officer of Circle B.

“We would like to thank the Switch Datacenters team for their important contribution to the adoption of OCP in Europe and are grateful that they will continue to support us and the OCP community in the future albeit in a different role,“ Hiddink and Kortekaas added.

The fully-functional OCP environment is now located in the AMS01 facility of maincubes. The datacenter is located very close to the Amsterdam Schiphol International Airport. “We see great potential for both Dutch and international OCP inspired projects“, says Joris te Lintelo, Vice President of maincubes. “Our location in Amsterdam is ideally located for Dutch visitors as well as datacenter owners and datacenter managers from abroad and we would like to invite you to come and meet with us.“

The OCP Experience Center is available as a demo center, but may also be used for testing new OCP Accepted and OCP Inspired datacenter environments and telco solutions.

Circle B was one of the first European channel partners to acquire the status of OCP Solution Provider®. Solution Providers are a special group of companies within the OCP ecosystem. They develop, test, deliver and support ready-made systems and environments based on OCP designs. Rittal is a well-known manufacturer of infrastructure solutions for data centers. As part of their product portfolio, Rittal designs, manufactures and sells racks and cooling solutions that are based on OCP designs. maincubes is part of German investor and real estate developer Art-Invest which is part of the German construction conglomerate Zech Group.

The three companies have determined that within the technology sector IT managers at large enterprises and governments in the European region have started to adopt OCP principles at scale. These principles form the basis on which many hyperscalers operate. By adopting OCP designs in their datacenters large and medium-sized enterprises and governments can benefit from the same advantages as the hyperscalers: cost reductions, lower energy usage and much more flexibility.

The European OCP Experience Center aims to help IT managers and datacenter managers to fully understand the impact of OCP designs on their facilities. The center will also allow them to test specific OCP-based solutions that are relevant to their IT environments.

"The European OCP Experience Center has played an important role in the adoption of OCP inspired datacenter designs in the European region“, states Steve Helvie, VP of Channel for the Open Compute Project Foundation. “Now that Switch Datacenters has sold off their AMS1 datacenter, I am happy to see that Rittal and Circle B have decided to partner with an important independent and European datacenter provider like maincubes. I am very excited that these three companies will continue to drive the growth of OCP in the European region“.