Red Hat cozies up with telecom providers as open standards gain traction – News

Red Hat Inc. is taking advantage of the growing popularity of the Open Radio Access Network and the related Artificial Intelligence RAN specification to highlight a number of new partnerships it has forged with telecommunication providers, in announcements to be made at the MWC mobile world congress conference kicking off Monday in Barcelona.

“One of the areas where Red Hat brings a significant advantage is having a common platform where application developers can test and deploy their network workloads,” said Fran Heeran, Red Hat’s vice president of global telecommunications. “We have seen dramatic improvements in consistency of application deployment across the network. It becomes significantly easier in a common cloud architecture, and you also get the economies of scale in infrastructure cost by standardizing on a common platform.”

Red Hat will highlight its growing role in open hybrid cloud, AI, and automation across the telecommunications industry. The announcements cover Open RAN deployments, cloud transformation, AI-driven networking and space-based data centers.

OpenShift is core to nearly all of them. “With 5G there is a push for containerization because carriers would like consistency across their estate,” Heeran said. “We even seeing a lot of voice transformations happening with [IP Multimedia Subsystem] being containerized. It’s in line with wanting the consistency of having all 4G and 5G applications use a consistent technology platform.”

Red Hat is collaborating with KDDI Corp. and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. to optimize O-RAN using Red Hat’s OpenShift Kubernetes platform for developing, deploying and managing containerized applications and Samsung’s virtualized RAN network. The companies said the initiative focuses on reducing deployment time, accelerating software upgrades, improving flexibility and minimizing downtime.

Features include image-based installation and upgrades for faster provisioning, zero-touch provisioning and a horizontal cloud platform enabling multiple vendors and functions across KDDI’s network.

Red Hat is also announcing that Safaricom PLC, Kenya’s leading telecom provider, has adopted OpenShift to modernize its IT infrastructure and improve the reliability of its M-PESA mobile payments platform. The companies said the deployment has halved turnaround times and improved system availability from 93% to 99.98%.

Automated cluster deployment has reduced setup time from two days to two hours. Scalability has been enhanced to manage peak traffic for financial transactions, along with stronger security and compliance through Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security.

Singapore-based StarHub Ltd. said it’s implementing its Cloud Infinity low-latency multicloud infrastructure using OpenShift to enhance operational flexibility. Cloud Infinity provides AI-enabled applications and cloud-native services for internal operations and customers, integrates DevSecOps development practices with machine learning operations for AI model lifecycle management and includes both public and private cloud services. StarHub also said it plans to expand AI-driven network automation and private 5G services with Red Hat as a managed services partner.

Red Hat and Fujitsu Ltd. are collaborating to develop virtualized RAN service using OpenShift, citing the benefits of zero-touch provisioning, low-latency processing on power-efficient Arm-based servers and AI for network automation and optimization.

SoftBank Group Corp. will announce it is working with Red Hat to integrate AI-driven RAN optimization in its AITRAS platform, an OpenShift-baesd AI-RAN orchestration system that dynamically adjusts network parameters to meet fluctuating demand, monitors energy consumption using Red Hat’s open-source Kepler project for real-time power tracking and uses Nvidia Corp. graphics processing units for resource efficiency. SoftBank said the enhancements will reduce operational costs and improve sustainability in telecom networks.

French telecommunications vendor Orange S.A.is standardizing its international telco cloud on OpenShift and Red Hat’s Ansible Automation Platform, consolidating containerized and virtualized workloads. The transition supports software-defined wide-area networking 4G/5G core services, internet of things services and roaming across 75 cloud points of presence.

Orange said the combination of OpenShift and Ansible should deliver near-zero downtime upgrades for network functions, four times faster deployments and improved energy efficiency.

Photo: Paul Gillin/ News