At Mobile World Congress Las Vegas, Dell Technologies and Wind River jointly announced Dell Telecom Infrastructure Blocks for Wind River, which will simplify telco cloud network deployment and management. These Telecom Infrastructure Blocks are built on Dell’s PowerEdge server portfolio, its bare metal orchestrator and Wind River Studio to create a fully integrated solution that the pair believe will help communication service providers (CSPs) accelerate the transformation of networks, particularly when it comes to the radio access network (RAN).
“It’s very complicated for our CSP customers to deploy a virtualized solution in the RAN network,” says Wind River CTO Paul Miller. “As a result, we are seeing a slower than normal adoption of the technology.”
Service providers are trying to integrate the hardware assets, a virtualization technology and then a variety of applications on top of that themselves. This, Miller says, is creating “significant cost burdens and complexities.” However, by providing a “fully integrated, continuously evaluated and complete solution,” the partnership between Dell and Wind River eliminates much of that complexity.
“What this partnership has done … is take on and solve that integration challenge,” Manish Singh, CTO of Dell’s Telecom Systems Business reiterated, further adding that when integration is done this way, operators can expect a more than 40% OPEX reduction and more than 130% in TCO reductions. “That’s a huge benefit,” Singh says.
In addition to the integration obstacle, working in a multi-vendor ecosystem also poses several challenges around receiving timely and reliable support during network outages. “In partnership with Wind River, what Dell has done is provide a unified support model to the service provider,” explains Singh. “What that means is that when the service provider makes the call to Dell, we take the first line of support and there is infrastructure set up with Wind River for a higher level of support.”
Miller provides further insight into the importance of such a model: “That single support model is incredibly important because those service providers are running networks that are carrying 911 calls. Our ability to respond quickly to an outage and provide recovery services as a unified solution is going to significantly reduce outage times and any impacts to that carrier’s business.”
In addition to this support model, Singh shared that Dell is also providing carrier-grade SLAs for response and restore and new custom services and configurations leveraging its Open Telecom Ecosystem Labs (OTEL).
According to Miller, when all these elements are taken together — simplified RAN integration, OPEX and TCO reductions, an improved network support model — they have the potential to result in “a significant impact on the adoption of Open RAN as a new technology.”
The Wind River Telecom Infrastructure Block will be available in November and is the first installment of a series of Telecom Infrastructure Blocks featuring cloud software from other Dell partners. Learn more here.
