On the first day of MWC, Red Hat revealed several additional tie-ups with operators and vendors around the world
Earlier this month, Red Hat — IBM-owned open source solutions provider — announced that T-Mobile US selected its Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus to automate its operations and support 5G applications across its private cloud, enabling the telco to discover new opportunities in edge computing, private networks and IoT.
On the first day of Mobile World Congress Barcelona, Red Hat revealed several additional tie-ups with operators and vendors around the world. Here’s a few:
SoftBank and Fujitsu are using Red Hat OpenShift to support the implementation of AI-RAN
Red Hat is working with SoftBank to address the “long-standing RAN implementation challenges” faced by service providers, including balancing user demands with energy costs, resource availability and managing deterministic and distributed workloads. The pair are also developing AITRAS, an integrated AI and RAN solution built on Red Hat OpenShift.
For Fujitsu, Red Hat OpenShift will support its cloud-native platform O-Cloud to enable virtualized and containerized Open RAN functions. Red Hat said that the use of its platform will provide Fujitsu with advanced orchestration and automation, ultra-low latency and improved performance and AI-ready virtualized RAN (vRAN).
In a press briefing, Red Hat’s Chief Technology Officer Ian Hood explained the two partnerships further: “What they’re doing here is bringing this next generation of Open RAN technology… where we can actually apply AI and RAN together both for the RAN and with the RAN… now they can actually improve how the RAN operates… but on top of that, they can use it deliver edge services and AI inference[ing] at the edge of the network on that same Open RAN platform,” he said.
The integration of AI and RAN, according to Hood, will allow for the optimization of both power consumption and networking performance.
Orange and Turkcell tap Red Hat OpenShift and Ansible Automation platform for faster deployment times
Red Hat is also working with France-based Orange is collaborating with to provide the underlying common telco cloud foundation for Orange International Networks. “[Orange is] looking to grow and build out their cloud operations to over 75 points of presence [or PoP], globally… And this is for your traditional and non-traditional business applications including SD-WAN, edge security gateways and includes their … core applications,” Fran Heeran, the vice president of global telecommunications at Red Hat, told press during a pre-briefing. He added that Orange’s use of the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform in addition to OpenShift is leading to a significant decrease in deployment times. “We’re looking at an operative four times faster deployment time with the automation elements provided by Ansible,” he added.
In a similar partnership, Turkish telco Turkcell is deepening its journey with Red Hat by implementing microservices, containerization and zero-touch provisioning with Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to enable faster deployment of cloud-native applications and to host multi-vendor network functions more easily. According to Heeran, the work with Turkcell has a very clear focus on the network core. “So deploying these platforms… around deploying core 5G workloads and then the next step is going to be expanding that into edge and RAN so there’s clearly a roadmap that their building up with us here. And also, discussions around the use of early stage AI applications… particularly around disaster resiliency and operational continuity, which is where we’re seeing a lot of AI use cases emerging.”
He added that “the common themes” across the partnerships with Orange and Turkcell is the emphasis on “faster deployment times, better automation and hosting a variety of different workload types, all standardizing on the Red Hat platform for telco.”
… and more
Additional announcements from Red Hat include the implementation of a hybrid multi-cloud solution Cloud Infinity, which is built on Red Hat OpenShift, by Singapore’s Starhub; Kenya’s Safaricom deploying Red Hat OpenShift as a common cloud platform; Japan’s KDDI working to develop and deploy an Open RAN built on Red Hat OpenShift to streamline operations; and Rakuten Mobile — as well as Rakuten Symphony — selecting Red Hat’s solutions and assistance for the management of complex, expansive Linux estates.
