Dell Technologies and Wind River: Empowering the Intelligent Edge | Dell Technologies

Co author: Jeff Gowan, Wind River

Delivering Containerized 5G Architecture

As service providers move towards 5G in order to realize improved service, operational agility, and greater revenue potential, there is a technology evolution in infrastructure to shift from monolithic, vertically integrated solutions to disaggregated models based on virtualization and the cloud for distributed networks. In this new cloud native, geo-distributed model, 5G will be enabled by virtualizing at the edge. A recent Heavy Reading study showed that 38% of service providers view the edge cloud as “critical” to their 5G strategy.

As the industry builds out their edge clouds to support the next generation of 5G services, it requires a carrier grade containerized infrastructure that allows for fast delivery of new services, while still meeting the 99.999% reliability requirements. Dell Technologies and Wind River are dedicated to delivering this modern infrastructure to their customers. More than just defining the architecture, Dell Technologies and Wind River have collaborated to develop and validate a reference architecture for 5G virtual RAN (vRAN) and other edge use cases. Service providers and ISV partners can be assured that the underlying infrastructure that this joint architecture provides will allow for fast and reliable deployments across a multitude of use cases.

The combination of the Dell EMC PowerEdge platforms with the hardened Wind River Cloud Platform, bring the best of breed products together into a single tested and qualified solution for the CSPs and ISVs to rely on for the critical infrastructure from the core to the edge of the network.”

Dell Technologies and Wind River Cloud Platform

Dell Technologies and Wind River have brought together the reliability and carrier class offerings of the Dell EMC PowerEdge R740 and XE2420 with Wind River Cloud Platform to run and manage the edge of the network. Based on the StarlingX open source project, Cloud Platform is a fully cloud-native, Kubernetes- and container-based architecture for the deployment and management of distributed edge networks at scale. The combination of the Dell EMC PowerEdge platforms with the hardened Wind River Cloud Platform, bring the best of breed products together into a single tested and qualified solution for the CSPs and ISVs to rely on for the critical infrastructure from the core to the edge of the network.

The joint solution supports CSPs with a containerized edge infrastructure that delivers the low latency, redundancy and high availability that carrier-grade workloads require and can also lower operational costs. The solution includes the unique ability to perform true zero-touch provisioning (ZTP,) fully autonomous turn up of remote edge sub clouds, regardless of the number of nodes. Because this is a validated reference architecture, Wind River Cloud Platform integrates effectively with essential infrastructure such as Dell EMC drivers like iDRAC and Redfish. All of this works together to provision, and scale resources as needed to achieve carrier-grade performance and reliability from Day 1. We want to help our customers find freedom at their edge to deploy services from all corners of the world without having humans constantly having to monitor them.

vRAN as a Use Case

The vRAN (Open RAN) use case is a perfect example of a target application so Dell Technologies and Wind River have created a validated reference architecture that defines the hardware and software requirements that build this carrier class solution. By optimizing the hardware infrastructure in concert with the containerized environment, it allows for a best of breed disaggregated solution that service providers can use as the baseline for their 5G ready platform. Another use case is to leverage Wind River Cloud Platform for Carrier/Telco Managed Private 4G/5G networks that allows network workloads to be extended into the Enterprise domain and still maintaining the security and flexibility that Telcos want. The platform enables network workloads, on premises MEC (Multi-access Edge Compute) and AEP (Application Enablement Platform) to coexist outside of the Telco Data Centers but still be secured and managed in an Enterprise Domain.

Working closely together, Dell Technologies and Wind River are committed to ensuring our customers can effectively deploy and monetize the platform for 5G use cases. When service providers are concerned about latency, reliability and security, look no further than our joint reference architecture.