Dell Technologies Inc. today introduced a range of new products for communications service providers that are intended to facilitate network cloud-based operations and simplify the deployment, automation and support of disaggregated network cloud infrastructure.

Citing decades of experience working with telecom providers, Dell said the new Telecom Infrastructure Automation Suite is intended to automate orchestration and lifecycle management of multivendor, network cloud infrastructure. Based on open standards and application program interfaces, it’s meant to integrate easily into existing networks and improve CSPs’ flexibility to deploy and manage their choice of infrastructure across distributed, multivendor environments.

“All the major operators are evaluating network virtualization and are in proofs of concept or limited deployments,” said Andrew Vaz, vice president of product management for Dell’s telecom systems business. “We’ve taken a significant step forward when telco operators asking not if they should transform but how.”

Declarative automation

Dell said the Infrastructure Automation Suite can save days or weeks on server configuration and provisioning using declarative automation, in which the desired outcomes or goals are specified, but the exact steps to achieve them are not explicitly defined.

Infrastructure discovery and automation are provided down to the network infrastructure layer with open application program interfaces and Dell services to support integration with telecom business support systems and operations support systems. Telemetry covers equipment temperature and CPU and memory utilization, enabling users to quickly reallocate resources if heat builds up or memory usage throttles performance.

The other major announcement, Dell Telecom Infrastructure Blocks for Red Hat, combines Dell servers such as the Dell PowerEdge XR8000 with Red Hat Inc.’s OpenShift and Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes.

It features support for 5G core workloads running at the edge, which builds on existing 5G core and radio access network support to enable CSPs to deploy a validated and consistent cloud platform from the core to the edge. The package integrates with the Telecom Infrastructure Automation Suite for infrastructure management and orchestration for multi-vendor environments.

Intent-driven orchestration

“At the bottom is compute, storage, [containers as a service] and network services,” Vaz said. “In the middle is a suite of services to orchestrate and manage these capabilities. We want to make it as flexible and unified a system as possible.” Intent-driven orchestration derives from Dell’s acquisition of Cloudify Ltd. last year.

Vaz said the Infrastructure Automation Suite is “very extensible and API-driven with [continuous integration/continuous deployment] models that lay the groundwork for AIOps,” a discipline that combines artificial intelligence with traditional IT operations. He said one early customer deployed the suite for closed-loop automation for power management and saw a 23% increase in server utilization rates, a 15% reduction in capital expenses and a 20% savings in total cost of ownership.

The Telecom Infrastructure Automation Suite will be globally available in April and the Telecom Infrastructure Blocks for Red Hat in May.

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