Wind River says the match-up with Rakuten Symphony will deliver more flexibility and choice for operators
Edge software provider Wind River announced this week a collaboration with Rakuten Symphony to accelerate telco adoption of Open RAN technology. Rakuten Symphony has expanded its partner ecosystem for Open RAN 4G and 5G solutions, allowing it to support Wind River Studio Operator, as well as its recently launched open-source eLxr Pro enterprise Linux solution. The match-up, the companies noted, will offer operators even more flexibility and choice.
The two companies completed an end-to-end proof of concept in which Rakuten Symphony’s Open RAN 4G and 5G SA vDU and vCU ran on the Wind River Studio Operator. “Rakuten Symphony’s Open RAN solution provides a software fabric that is field hardened for performance and optimization, covering both LTE and 5G technologies. This enables true pre-proven Open RAN choice on chosen common platforms,” Wind River said in a press release.
In the same release, Raghunath Hariharan, chief technology officer at Rakuten Symphony, said the companies are ready to begin “engaging in customer discussions and bringing our stack to market.” He commented also: “By expanding our partner ecosystem to Wind River, we deliver on the promise of providing additional choice to all customers as they accelerate their journey toward Open RAN … eLxr Pro creates a great opportunity to provide more choice and flexibility to customers as they develop for the unique challenges of near-edge networks and workloads.”
Designed for intelligent edge, far edge device, near edge server, regional data center and public cloud scenarios, Wind River’s eLxr Pro provides enterprise customers with long-term commercial support, professional services, ongoing security updates and technical assistance, as well as services add-ons, said the company. The other Wind River solution in the equation, its Studio Operator, provides a “fully cloud-native, Kubernetes- and container-based architecture for the development, deployment, operations and servicing of distributed edge networks at scale,” simplifying the deployment and management of cloud-native infrastructure for core-to-edge distributed cloud networks.
Paul Miller, the chief technology officer at Wind River, explained that by integrating eLxr Pro into the Rakuten Symphony cloud portfolio, the companies can help help meet “unique cloud-to-edge deployment needs,” and that by incorporating Rakuten Cloud Native Storage into Studio Operator, customers can run high-performance workloads on the company’s platform for edge and core use cases.
“Together with Rakuten Symphony, we are delivering a powerful combined stack that increases flexibility and choice, streamlining the transition to cloud-based and Open RAN architectures,” he said. “This allows CSPs to unlock the full potential of open and cloud RAN, ensuring competitiveness and a fully programmable infrastructure across 4G and 5G while opening new avenues for network monetization.”
