Businesses globally are harnessing the power of the cloud, appreciating its speed, reliability and ease of use.

With telco cloud, which allows telecommunications providers to configure and add services with ease, enables users to leverage cloud principles while reducing operating costs. This is a critical necessity, as telecommunication companies need innovative, new services to compete with other players.

“One thing Dell is doing is offering an infrastructure block where we are taking over the overhead of certifying every release coming from the Red Hat or the Wind River of the world,” said Charles Tsai (pictured, right), senior director of product management at Dell Technologies Inc. “We want telcos to spend their resources on what is going to generate them revenue, not the overhead of creating this cloud stack.”

Tsai and Peter Fetterolf (pictured, left), chief technology officer at ACG Business Research, spoke with theCUBE industry analysts Dave Vellante and David Nicholson at MWC 2023, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the benefits of telco clouds, how Dell is looking to reduce overhead and simplify telecom infrastructure, what challenges the telco cloud could potentially pose and more. (* Disclosure below.)

A horizontal approach to the cloud

While clouds are traditionally centralized in huge data centers, telco clouds have both regional data centers and larger data centers. Edge data centers are popping up, and even cell sites are beginning to act as mini-data centers, Fetterolf explained.

“Even as we’ve moved to virtualization, if you look at packet core for instance, a lot of them are these vertical stacks of say a Nokia or Ericsson or Huawei, where you can’t put any other vendors or any other solutions into that,” Fetterolf said. “The idea is horizontal architecture, not just across my central data centers, but across my edge data centers, which would be traditionally my access COs, as well as my cell sites. I have an open environment.”

Reducing spending is one of the main draws of adopting a telco cloud, offering reduced labor, power and even the number of services. Another huge benefit of the telco cloud, however, is automation and simplicity of use, according to Tsai.

“With the customized hardware, what we allow operators to do is take out the existing appliance and push an edge-optimized server without reworking the entire infrastructure,” he said. “There is a significant saving where you don’t have to rethink about what is my power infrastructure … the server is designed to leverage the existing and what is already there.”

Shift to a Connect-centric Compute Architecture

As previously reported on SiliconANGLE, server architectures are moving from a world where the central processing unit (CPU) got all the attention and was the main driver of price/performance improvements. Increasingly, silicon providers like Broadcom, which deliver networking cards, storage controllers and other supporting components to OEMs, will drive future performance gains.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the MWC 2023 event:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for MWC 2023. Neither Dell Technologies Inc., the primary sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE