DULUTH, GEORGIA – AMI®, a global leader in powering, managing and securing the world’s connected digital infrastructure, is pleased to announce its contribution of its Aptio OpenEdition™ UEFI Firmware and MegaRAC OpenEdition™ BMC Firmware code bases to the Open Compute Project®. As part of this announcement, the AMI product formerly known as MegaRAC® OSP BMC Firmware has been rebranded as MegaRAC OpenEdition BMC Firmware to acknowledge and draw a clear line to its position as AMI’s open-source BMC firmware code base offering.
The Open Compute Project (OCP®) represents a global community of technology leaders working together to break open the black box of proprietary IT infrastructure to achieve greater choice, customization, and cost savings. OCP makes these solutions, standards and designs available through its OCP Marketplace, where organizations of all types and sizes can research and learn how to purchase OCP Accepted™ and OCP Inspired™ products.
AMI is committed to contributing to the open-source community to encourage transparency, reliability and security. As an OCP Contributor, AMI’s objectives are to drive the industry forward, encourage broader adoption of industry-standard datacenter solutions and harness a respected platform to provide innovative features back to the Community. With these goals in mind, AMI continues to work with leading ODMs in this space such as MiTAC Computing Technology® Corporation to focus on the OCP Marketplace server platforms that are most popular with the OCP end-user Community. Point-of-use customers can then utilize this hardened open-source tree for these well-supported OCP Marketplace systems.
As part of its commitment to OCP and open-source initiatives, AMI will collaborate closely with silicon providers, ODMs and OEMs to provide open firmware solutions based on the most prevalent source trees – such as OpenBMC for remote management and TianoCore/EDKII for UEFI implementation – while it develops additional value-add features for them. In this way, AMI can maintain the base source, offer multiple levels of support options and add-ons for advanced features. Additionally, the AMI source trees will be fully managed and maintained by AMI with its world class engineer-to-engineer support and the goal of future, ongoing contributions to OCP from AMI.
The benefits of participation from an industry leader such as AMI are far reaching and important. Continued adoption of OCP firmware throughout the industry will help start and scale firmware development teams, reducing the time needed for onboarding and training developers. Firmware development for new and existing projects benefit from the inclusion of industry-leading firmware development tools.
Most importantly, adopters of OCP firmware will save time and resources both now and far into the future, extending the lifecycle of their platforms as AMI manages future firmware updates – an economical path that will yield improved results. Flexibility is also assured as AMI will work with ODM partners to provide firmware support for the most popular OCP platforms, along with tiered levels of support to accommodate a wide variety of needs.
“AMI’s new role in OCP as a Contributor is an emphatic expression of our desire to fully embrace open-source opportunities and find additional ways to support our customers and the industry at large,” said Zachary Bobroff, Senior Director of Product Office at AMI and a key driver of OCP participation at AMI. “There are millions of OCP platforms deployed in the world today and we believe that our participation reflects our increasing focus on supporting OEMs, ODMs, circular economy champions within OCP and the end users who are embracing this new paradigm. Our goal is to more deeply engage with these parties and drive solutions forward on multiple levels, now and in the future.”
“OCP is grateful for AMI’s contribution of its Aptio OpenEdition and MegaRAC OpenEdition code bases to the Open Compute Project. This code base is part of our larger strategy to deliver validated, secure and scalable cloud solutions,” said Rajeev Sharma, Director of Software Technologies for the Open Compute Project Foundation. “AMI’s participation underscores the importance and growing enthusiasm for open-source initiatives at all levels of the scalable computing ecosystem. We are also pleased with the development efficiency and security benefits that flow from the participation of an industry leader like AMI in the OCP Community.”
Bill Carter, OCP’s Chief Technology Officer added that “This announcement means that developers can now consume the standard OCP firmware build, including the Aptio OpenEdition and MegaRAC OpenEdition code from AMI, directly from an industry leader with decades of BMC and BIOS firmware development. As part of its ongoing contributions to OCP, AMI will be working with the OCP Community to upstream community derived code and will continue to push updated, validated code from AMI developers out to the Community. The results will provide adopters with the most widely adopted, stable, secure and hardened code available.”
“AMI has been a longstanding partner of MiTAC and leader in the firmware space. We appreciate AMI’s plan of supporting the industry through open-source solutions in OCP and plan to continue our engagements to create solutions that meet market needs. AMI’s world-class support is vital to creating production-quality firmware; we welcome AMI’s announcement of its OCP contributions and look forward to collaborating with AMI on this initiative,” said Danny Hsu, Vice President of Server Infrastructure Business Unit of MiTAC Computing Technology Corporation.
Availability
AMI’s Aptio OpenEdition and MegaRAC OpenEdition code bases are freely available from the respective Open Compute Project GitHub® repositories at https://github.com/opencomputeproject/Aptio-OpenEdition and https://github.com/opencomputeproject/MegaRAC-OpenEdition. For more information about the Aptio OpenEdition and MegaRAC OpenEdition code base components from AMI, along with a useful infographic outlining the key features and benefits of leveraging open-source firmware code from AMI, please visit ami.com/ocp.
About Open Compute Foundation and the OCP Marketplace
The Open Compute Project Foundation (OCP) was initiated in 2011 with a mission to apply the benefits of open source and open collaboration to hardware and rapidly increase the pace of innovation in, near and around the datacenter’s networking equipment, general purpose and GPU servers, storage devices and appliances, and scalable rack designs. OCP’s collaboration model is being applied beyond the datacenter, helping to advance the telecom industry & Edge infrastructure. More information about the OCP Marketplace can be found at https://www.opencompute.org/products.
The OCP and OPEN COMPUTE PROJECT marks are owned by and used with the permission of the Open Compute Project Foundation. OpenBMC™ is a trademark of LF Projects, LLC in the US and other countries. GITHUB® is an exclusive trademark registered in the United States by GitHub, Inc. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are the respective property of their owners.