Building and scaling out a modern telecom network is about to get a lot easier. Last year, Dell Technologies unveiled Dell Telecom Infrastructure Blocks for Red Hat, effectively allowing telecom operators to buy their Red Hat® OpenShift®-based cloud stack for running 5G Core and RAN workloads in factory-integrated blocks direct from Dell. This year, we’ve taken our Telecom Infrastructure Blocks for Red Hat and turbocharged them with our new Dell Telecom Infrastructure Automation Suite and Dell PowerEdge 16G servers featuring 4th Generation, Intel Scalable Xeon processors with vRAN Boost technology.
Dell Telecom Infrastructure Automation Suite: Automation for a Cloud-native World
Moving to a modern network based on open, cloud-native architectures is all about maintaining choice while accelerating the pace of innovation. It’s about choosing best-of-breed components to meet your business objectives. At the same time, building and maintaining a modern network introduces its own set of challenges. It requires unique skillsets to ensure interoperability amongst all the components of the stack. It also requires automation to roll them into production and keep up with all the latest patches and technology upgrades across your network. That is why we’re integrating our new Telecom Infrastructure Automation Suite into Telecom Infrastructure Blocks.
Dell Telecom Infrastructure Automation Suite uses declarative automation to simplify deployment and lifecycle management of the server infrastructure. Every Infrastructure Block comes with blueprints used by our Automation Suite to ensure a consistent deployment or upgrade that aligns with infrastructure configuration best practices derived from the design and integration testing we perform with our cloud platform partners. This significantly reduces the time and skillsets required to ensure interoperability and keep up with all the latest patches and upgrades.
Our Telecom Automation Suite is an extensible automation framework that includes rich APIs that can be leveraged by you or Dell Services to integrate into your service management orchestration, operational and business support systems or other applications. It also aggregates infrastructure telemetry from all the Infrastructure Blocks deployed across your network to feed AIOps applications that streamline Day 2 operations.
Powering up Infrastructure Blocks with Dell PowerEdge 16G Servers
We have also brought our latest generation of telecom-optimized servers into the Infrastructure Blocks family. That means telecom operators can now build their networks using Dell’s fastest, most powerful and most energy-efficient servers to date. These PowerEdge servers are designed for the next generation of communications and business applications. It starts with using 4th Gen Intel Xeon scalable processors with Intel vRAN Boost for unparalleled performance. These processors deliver up to 2x the performance in vRAN applications and 1.88x performance in user plane functions over the previous generation. We have also developed a host of new energy-efficient features to improve cooling and reduce energy costs. Our short form factory, NEBS 3 compliant PowerEdge XR8000 chassis is purpose built for the far edge of your network. Its sled-based chassis is designed to support multiple generations of processors to simplify the process of staying on the leading edge of the cost and performance curve. It packs two single-socket server sleds in a 2U form factor with plans to support up to four sleds in a single 2U chassis in the future. We have also introduced the PowerEdge XR5610. An efficient, 1U, short form factor, NEBS 3 compliant, single processor server to provide customers with more choice when optimizing the design of their network.
It’s All Been Building Up to This
Why are we doing this? We’ve listened to our telecommunications customers, and they’ve told us the biggest hurdles they face in building and scaling out their 5G networks are cost and complexity. There are simply too many moving parts and pieces from different vendors to create a cloud-native network without incurring significant time, cost and risk. So, we’ve leveled these hurdles by building foundational building blocks for them in our factory, including a complete hardware and software stack running on Red Hat OpenShift with the latest server technology. We’ve worked with Red Hat to do all the integration and validation upfront. We’ve designed those building blocks to simplify the design, deployment and maintenance of your network—whether you’re deploying virtual network functions in your core network, modernizing your network with Open RAN or deploying new 5G applications. And we’ve built in automation that simplifies deployment and upgrades while preserving vendor choice.
Count on Dell Technologies to simplify your network transformation and bring the future of 5G closer to your business. It’s never been easier to deploy cloud-native, 5G infrastructure anywhere you need it. Discover how easy it is to bring your network into the future. Visit us in Hall 3, booth 3M30 at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and see what Dell can do for you.
