Avnet Embedded Opens Development Labs

PHOENIX -- Avnet Embedded, a division of Avnet Electronics Marketing Americas, a business region of Avnet, Inc. (NYSE: AVT), today announced the launch of its Open Compute Project (OCP) Innovation Labs. These OCP Innovation Labs will serve as both technology showcases and development labs for users, developers and partners to design, deliver and integrate cost-effective, power-efficient compute, storage and networking solutions. The lab will provide the OCP community with local and remote access to resources offering “hands-on” enablement of platform and configuration testing, hardware and software validation, performance tuning and community innovation. Avnet brings together the hardware, connectivity and technical support resources to assist developers with application creation.

The initial lab will be located in Eden Prairie, Minn., with additional sites planned for Arizona, California, Massachusetts, New York, Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong during the balance of 2013. Avnet Embedded, a certified member of the OCP community, provides OCP-compliant compute, storage and networking solutions through its Rorke Data business unit. The Open Compute community is a rapidly growing community of engineers around the world whose mission is to design and enable the delivery of the most efficient server, storage and data center hardware designs for scalable computing.

“Avnet Embedded is committed to helping our partners with the creation and implementation of open source compute, storage and networking solutions. These state-of-the-art labs provide our customers the advantage of direct access to a global development and delivery partner,” said Chuck Kostalnick, senior vice president, Avnet Embedded. “We believe the OCP/datacenter initiative is important not just for today – but for the future and we’ve invested in this future to help customers who share the same vision.”

"We're thrilled to see Avnet making such a significant investment in helping more companies consume efficient, scalable hardware based on Open Compute designs," said Cole Crawford, COO of the Open Compute Foundation. "Global solutions providers like Avnet are playing a key role in bringing the promise of open hardware to anyone who wants it."