Avnet Embedded, an Avnet unit by way of Avnet Electronics Marketing Americas, has launched Open Compute Project (OCP) Innovation Labs 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.

It says 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 will bring together the hardware, connectivity and technical support resources to assist developers with application creation.

The initial lab will be located in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, with additional sites planned for Arizona, California, Massachusetts, New York, Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong later this year.

Avnet Embedded will be providing OCP-compliant compute, storage and networking solutions through its Rorke Data business unit.

"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 senior VP Chuck Kostalnick. "We believe the OCP/data center 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."