About Us
The Sustainable & Scalable Infrastructure Alliance (SSIA) is a community-based organization dedicated to creating, fostering and driving adoption of open standards that increase the efficiencies of the data center and digital infrastructure supply chains. We enable digital leaders from any sized organization to adopt and deploy advanced and highly efficient rack-level datacenter technologies to increase sustainability, power next-generation workloads and reduce cost and waste, regardless of deployment size or location.
SSIA members include data center operators, private and public cloud end users, supply chain manufacturers and technology component providers, as well as thousands of individual members active in the cloud, technology, data center and edge ecosystem.
Our Mission
History of the SSIA
The SSIA was founded in 2016 as the Open19 Project. Born out of LinkedIn and spearheaded by Yuval Bachar, the project introduced a fully open standard for innovative “brick based” plug and play rack architectures, that brought hyperscale efficiencies to the mass market. With a unique powershelf design and brick cage that supported standardized server “brick” modules using a blind mate connector model for both data and power, the open source design created disruptive efficiencies, component re-use and cost reductions while remaining agnostic on technology within the server brick.
In January 2021, Open19 joined the Linux Foundation as the LF’s primary project for data center hardware innovation. Work began on a “v2” specifically through an open working group model that included a 48V native server brick and power shelf design, improvements to the popular blind mate connectors, support for higher data transfer options and the introduction of a standard liquid cooling specification.
In August 2023, Open19 was rebranded as the Sustainable & Scalable Infrastructure Alliance (SSIA) in order to more appropriately support the goals and initiative of a diverse community focused on infrastructure sustainability throughout the datacenter and cloud technology supply chain.
Governance
SSIA’s community is represented by individuals and organizations with deep infrastructure experience and passion for a sustainable technology future.
Christopher Liljenstolpe
Board Chair (Cisco)
Christopher is Chief Architect in the Cloud department at Cisco, based in San Francisco. Before joining Cisco, Christopher was the original architect of Project Calico and one of the project’s evangelists. Prior to leading Project Calico, Chris was the director of solutions architecture at Metaswitch Networks.
Fredrik Rovik
Board Member (Serve the World)
Fredrik is the founder and CEO of Serve the World, a leading hosting and private cloud provider based in Oslo, Norward.
My Truong
Invited Member (Community)
My D. Truong is the Field CTO of Equinix, which he joined through the acquisition of Packet in 2020. At Packet he worked with a team focused on applied research and development, with a mission to “Build a Better Internet” by focusing on community engagement at the Edge. Prior to Packet, My served in various technical roles at Molex, Uber, Yelp, Spot Trading, and Purdue University. He graduated with an MS from Purdue University’s College of Technology and BSEE from Purdue University’s College of Engineering.
Zachary Smith
Invited Member (Community)
Zac has been a regular innovator in the cloud and datacenter industry for over 20 years. Most recently, Zac led the digital infrastructure side of Equinix after the company acquired Packet, a company he co-founded in 2014 to provide automated datacenter capabilities to leading digital businesses. Prior to Packet, Zac was an early member of Voxel, a Linux-based cloud company acquired by Internap in 2011.