As the shift from a closed environment to an open one becomes the norm, the cloud is emerging as an ideal stepping stone to help ease the transition.

With communication service providers eyeing Open RAN and Virtual RAN deployments for a unified cloud environment, Dell Technologies Inc. and Wind River Systems Inc. have teamed up to address challenges such as reintegrating what has been disaggregated along this journey, according to Gil Hellmann (pictured, right), vice president of telecom solutions at Wind River.

“If you’re looking at Open RAN, you have to look at it as three major layers: the management, application and the infrastructure … and the challenges of integration, of complexity,” he said. “This is where … Dell and Winder River sit together and say … how can we make this simpler? Basically, taking this whole infrastructure layer integration pain out, de-risking everything, and then continuing from there to work with the ecosystem vendor to reintegrate, validate the application on top of this infrastructure.”

As previously reported on SiliconANGLE, RAN environments are compute intensive, and Dell, HPE and other server vendors are increasingly building architectures that rely on connecting various supporting elements in the compute architecture, such as Ethernet cards, RAID controllers and other silicon. Technologies from providers such as Broadcom Inc. are a hidden under the covers, and while they don’t get as much attention as traditional CPU suppliers, they are becoming an important element of performance increases and cost reductions.

Hellmann and Abdullah Abuzaid (left), technical product manager at Dell, spoke with theCUBE industry analysts Lisa Martin and David Nicholson at MWC 2023, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how Dell and Wind River are making the work easier for CSPs when adopting Open RAN. (* Disclosure below.)

Going the on-prem scalable cloud way

Based on Wind River’s expertise of building high-performance and reliable infrastructure, it’s going the extra mile to create an on-prem scalable cloud to make telcos more efficient, according to Hellmann, who said that this necessitates the integration of various items.

“To oversimplify, I call it a cloud OS,” he stated. “It’s a lot more than OS, it’s an operating device that includes the application, the hardware and everything fused together; it’s now being decomposed. We’re basically providing a solution to build an on-premises, scalable cloud from the core all the way to the far edge that doesn’t compromise reliability, doesn’t compromise performance, and addresses all the telco needs.”

For efficient operations in the open ecosystem, the Dell and Wind River partnership seeks to take complexities and TCO challenges away, according to Abuzaid, who said that solutions like lifecycle management come in handy.

“The relationship between Dell and Wind River is not new; we’ve been collaborating in the open ecosystem for long time,” he noted. “The open environment ecosystem, it has a plus and a concern. The plus of simplicity, choice of multiple vendors, and then the concern of complexity managing these vendors. We build our partnership with Wind River in order to help our customer to simplify or run deployment, operation and lifecycle management and sustain it.”

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