Built for speed and simplicity, Dell Technologies’ AI-ready infrastructure and automation tools help CSPs fast-track their journey to cloud-native
The telecom industry is in the midst of a profound architectural shift—from proprietary, vertically integrated stacks to disaggregated, cloud-native infrastructure. While this transformation offers tremendous benefits in scalability, agility, and service innovation, it also introduces complexity in deployment, interoperability, and lifecycle management.
Dell Technologies and Red Hat are tackling these challenges head-on with Dell Telecom Infrastructure Blocks for Red Hat—a flexible, engineered solution purpose-built to help communications service providers (CSPs) streamline the deployment of open, cloud-native networks while reducing time to market.
“The telecom industry has taken massive transformation from a proprietary, vertically-integrated architecture to a cloud-native disaggregated architecture,” Anjali Bhatia, principal engineer in technical marketing at Dell Technologies, said. “This is why Dell partnered with Red Hat on a solution, Dell Telecom Infrastructure Blocks for Red Hat.”
At the heart of Dell Telecom Infrastructure Blocks for Red Hat is a fully integrated, validated infrastructure, automation and cloud software stack. The architecture includes:
- Infrastructure layer—telco-grade Dell PowerEdge servers and verified Dell PowerSwitch network switches.
- Domain manager—the Dell Telecom Infrastructure Automation Suite, which provides hardware automation and lifecycle management.
- Cloud platform—Red Hat® OpenShift®, delivering a production-grade container-as-a-service (CaaS) platform.
This horizontal cloud architecture allows CSPs to pool resources and deploy containerized workloads—from OSS and BSS to 5G Core, edge and RAN—on a unified, scalable foundation.
Big picture, Bhatia explained, “You are not wasting your resources…it is cost efficient.”
Dell Telecom Infrastructure Blocks for Red Hat can power a wide variety of deployment environments and compute needs, including core workloads on PowerEdge R660, R760, R6615, and R7615 servers; edge and RAN workloads on ruggedized PowerEdge XR5610, XR8000, XR8610t, and XR8602t servers; and networking via the Dell PowerSwitch Z9432-ON and S5232-ON switches.
This flexibility makes it easy for operators to extend consistent cloud-native infrastructure from the core to the edge to RAN, while tailoring hardware to workload-specific requirements. And the deployment lifecycle is simplified into three stages—Day 0, Day 1, and Day 2+—with Dell and Red Hat removing friction at every step:
- Day 0 – Technology onboarding and pre-production: Dell handles pre-integration, validation, and factory pre-loading to eliminate manual setup. This first step, Bhatia said, often “literally kills the time to market…We are doing that pre-integration, pre-testing, pre-validation, so you don’t have to spend the time in that aspect.”
- Day 1 – Production: Fully configured systems are delivered to CSPs ready to deploy. “It’s like a box that’s ready,” she said.
- Day 2+ – Operations and support: Dell provides CI/CD tools to integrate with the CSP’s environment plus unified support across Dell hardware, infrastructure automation software and the Red Hat software. “Whether it’s a hardware or software issue, it’s already supported by Dell.”
With its fourth release, Dell Telecom Infrastructure Blocks for Red Hat is now AI-ready—giving CSPs a foundation not just for cloud-native network functions but for emerging AI use cases. Bhatia called out high value AI-enabled use cases like edge inferencing, chatbots, and video analytics.
To help CSPs onboard workloads faster and with confidence, Dell has a certification program for Dell Telecom Infrastructure Blocks for Red Hat that leverages its Open Telecom Ecosystem Lab (OTEL) as-a-Service, enabling seamless onboarding of containerized network functions (CNFs). “We will provide you with seamless test cases to do successful onboarding,” Bhatia said.
This ecosystem of certified partners already includes solutions from 6D Technologies, Amdocs, Axyom.Core, Ciena, Compax Digital, Expeto, Ericsson, FNT, Matrixx Software, NEC, and ng-voice.
Dell Telecom Infrastructure Blocks for Red Hat provides an optimized foundation for next-generation telecom clouds, enabling CSPs to accelerate network transformation, advance AI innovation, and simplify their journeys toward unlocking new growth opportunities.
