Dell Technologies Inc. today introduced new telecommunications products and services aimed at boosting open telecom standards and helping communications service providers build open cloud-native networks.

Dell said it’s aiming to remove complexity while quickening the pace of network deployments based on open standards, which are increasingly being adopted by telecom providers. Although CSPs value the flexibility that open standards give them, they are often faced with complex integration tasks. Open alternatives also typically lack the performance of established networks, which is a problem when implementing cloud-native 5G services.

The new Dell Telecom Multi-Cloud Foundation is a turnkey package that includes Dell hardware, its Bare Metal Orchestrator management software and a telecom provider’s choice of cloud software platforms from Red Hat Inc., VMware Inc. and Wind River Systems Inc.

Introduced last October, the Bare Metal Orchestrator is aimed at helping telecom providers deploy and manage hundreds of thousands of servers for Open RAN and 5G deployments. Open RAN is an industry collaborative that’s focused on building open, intelligent, virtual and interoperable radio access networks, which are the parts of a wireless telecommunications system that connects individual devices to other parts of a network. Providers can use Bare Metal Orchestrator to discover and inventory servers, bring them online and deploy software, regardless of where they reside in the network, Dell said.

CSPs have “taken an integrated solution and disaggregated it” to gain the flexibility that openness provides, said Andrew Vaz, vice president of product management in Dell’s telecom systems business. “Now they can harness innovation at every horizontal layer in the stack and make changes without downtime.”

Open deployment at scale

New Dell Bare Metal Orchestrator modules have been added to give CSPs the ability to deploy and manage the lifecycle of the full cloud foundation stack. CSPs can have a scalable cloud foundation that spans core, edge and RAN, Dell said.

The company said its platform provides additional flexibility for carriers to design and deploy open network functions with their edge services while saving time on server provisioning, software upgrades and cloud stack integration and testing.

“This allows us to integrate with the next level up [from Layer One], which is the cloud stack,” Vaz said. We can do all the work to bring the entire bottom part of the stack up to a level where you can deploy workloads in a very quick manner.

“Think of these modules as blueprints and instructions that allow you to program the underlying infrastructure,” he said. “It takes the guesswork and human error out and you gain the flexibility to deploy workloads as you want.”

Freeing up CPUs

Dell’s new Open RAN Accelerator Card, which was developed in collaboration with Marvell Technology Group Ltd., is intended to bring the performance of 5G radio networks to Open RAN. It’s an inline 5G Layer One processing card for virtual RAN and Open RAN environments based on Dell PowerEdge and other x86-based servers that offloads a significant amount of the processing power needed for operations, yielding greater scale and lower costs.

“Today, a lot of Layer One functionality takes up about two-thirds of the processing work on the CPUs,” Vaz said. “We’re essentially freeing that up by putting it all on this offload card.”

Customers can map up to four offload cards to a single server CPU, he said. Carriers can also aggregate additional cell sites and put edge functionality on network servers. “You’ve freed up a lot of functionality on the server to offer some very interesting architectures with massive cost savings,” Vaz said.

A new iteration of Dell ProDeploy software aimed at network functions virtualization infrastructure brings functionality Dell previously rolled out only to enterprise customers to telecommunications carriers. ProDeploy is a configuration of both hardware and systems software that can be used by certified deployment engineers. CSPs can use ProDeploy for NFVI to put into operation quickly network infrastructure with integrated compute, networking and telecom cloud software platforms. Dell claimed the integration enables 68% faster infrastructure deployment time.

“For 5G, far edge sites and services edge the scale is different” for carriers than for enterprises, Vaz said. “The customization requirements are very high and we can now take Dell’s expertise and factory integration capabilities and deploy at scale in volume for a telco environment.”

Dell is also introducing two new Validated Designs, which are pre-tested server configurations designed for specific use cases. The Validated Design for Services Edge 1.2 brings combines edge compute with private wireless connectivity to simplify the task of deploying and securing large numbers of edge locations. Carriers can use the design to place sensors and devices at the edge of mobile networks to capture and process data in near-real time.

The Validated Design for the 5G Core with Oracle and VMware gives CSPs the choice to build a 5G core on industry-standard infrastructure more securely and reliably.

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