open19 summit - The Foundation expects 2019 to be the year of deployments

We attended the Open19 Foundation Summit 2019 in San Jose, CA.  The key message of the leadership team of the Foundation was that it expects 2019 to be the year where Open19 systems begin shipping.  Yuval Bachar, President of the Foundation explained that there are 8-10 companies that are deploying or seriously considering, including two mega data center operators in process of evaluation and at least 6 adopters in advanced evaluation/deployment.  Open19 does not specify what technology will be inside the systems; it only defines the form factor.  Interestingly, GPU and ARM designs are included and we heard about AMD CPU more often than we did Intel.  
 
VaporIO made a presentation about its edge data center systems.  Matt Trifiro, CMO of VaporIO explained that its systems nominally consume up to 165 kw in a 9 foot round datacenter.  It claims that Vapor IO is deploying in 6 cities, 3 to 4 data centers in each city.

ASUS and a new company, German Edge Cloud, both made interesting presentations.  Salim Fedel, Associate VP Enterprise Solutions Business Group, ASUS, presented a few of the company's Open19 oriented products, Alps19, Brick and its Network Switch.  Jason Rylands, VP of Data Center Strategy & International Sales, German Edge Cloud, made a very interesting presentation about its company's activities in Germany on how it is participating in the manufacturing industry in Germany.  There is reticence on putting manufacturing data and control on the cloud, but there is a desire to build a German-only computing system, driven in part by GDPR and part by the nation's focus on manufacturing - that's the opportunity.  German Edge Cloud has decided to use Open19 systems - accessing only the front of the racks is a big deal, it believes.

German Edge Cloud shared many examples of how it is engaging with manufacturers for real-time error tracking during the manufacturing process, using analytics, and sharing information between various companies in the German supply chain.