Dell Technologies said this week it is helping the telecommunications industry “accelerate the adoption of open, cloud-native technologies” with a series of new product offerings and partnerships timed to coincide with the start of Mobile World Congress 2023 next week in Barcelona.
Launched were Dell Telecom Infrastructure Blocks for Red Hat, new Dell PowerEdge edge servers, a private wireless program and expanded lab capabilities.
“The promise of open telecom network architecture is clear to operators, but has so far been a challenge to realize,” said Dennis Hoffman, senior vice president and general manager at the company’s telecom systems business.
“To address this challenge, the industry needs to create consumable, tested solutions that telecom operators can confidently deploy in their networks.”
An example is the joint initiative with Red Hat, to be available in the second half of this year, which is designed to help network operators meet the demands of 5G core and radio access network (RAN) workloads.
Co-designed with Red Hat, and backed by Dell services and support, the release said that the cloud-native offering includes the hardware, software and subscriptions that network operators need to build, scale out and power core network functions using Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes.
With the expanded Telecom Infrastructure Block portfolio, network operators can improve the efficiency of how they use their IT resources to reduce operational costs and power consumption, which lowers their carbon footprint, Dell said.
ACG Research estimates that communications service providers (CSPs) deploying it can reduce opex (operating expense) by as much as 40 per cent and capex (capital expense) by 10 per cent versus deploying telecom cloud infrastructure.
According to the Dell release, ACG found that, by “reducing power and cooling expenses, 833 Metric tons of total CO2 emissions can be saved over five years, which is equivalent to driving 179 gas-powered cars for one year or the average amount of electricity used by 162 homes during one year.”
Honoré LaBourdette, vice president, telco, media, entertainment, and edge ecosystem at Red Hat, said, “networks operating at scale from the core to the edge require layered capabilities, across infrastructure and software-defined architecture, with added security measures, orchestration and cloud-native applications.”
PowerEdge servers
The new Dell PowerEdge XR8000, XR7620 and XR5610 servers, which are based on 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors, are designed for telecom, open RAN and mobile edge computing workloads while simplifying edge operations, the company said. They will be available in May, but Dell is not disclosing pricing at this time,
Private wireless
The Dell Private Wireless Program is designed to offer CSPs and enterprise customers more choice in private wireless offerings, so that they can find the best fit for their own needs, Dell said. Jointly developed with technology partners, the private wireless solutions, based on open architectures, are pre-tested and validated by Dell, and include self-service operations capabilities.
Open Telecom Ecosystem Labs
Finally, the Dell Open Telecom Ecosystem Lab, located in Round Rock, Texas, according to the company supports “more than 25 customers and partners with testing, certifying and validating open telecom solutions and applications, so they can be quickly and easily deployed in telecom networks.”
Dell is ramping its efforts to accelerate innovation and simplify ecosystem collaboration with the following:
- A new Open Telecom Ecosystem Lab in Cork, Ireland, which will provide customers and partners with another location to collaborate “across the global, open telecom ecosystem.”
- Dell Open Telecom Ecosystem Lab Validation Services, which build upon the lab’s capabilities to give customers dedicated access to Dell engineers for ongoing design consultation and validation, helping CSPs to mitigate risk and launch new offerings and services more quickly.
- A new Wind River self-certification lab testing environment for partners to test and validate their software with the Wind River Studio cloud-native platform before deploying in a telecom network.
