Red Hat and Samsung have added enhanced integration and automation to their partnership to deploy 5G vRAN solutions.
The two are working together to help address the need for service providers to validate network functionality, interoperability and performance of an end-to-end vRAN solution. The companies’ solution will be designed to provide customers with:
- An end-to-end virtualised solution that helps reduce complexity and mitigate operational and deployment risks with enhanced automation and integration capabilities;
- A future-proof and flexible network that can adapt to rapidly changing demands as admins will be able to remotely apply updates.
According to a Red Hat-sponsored sustainability study, RAN is responsible for 75% of a service provider’s total power consumption. With Red Hat OpenShift, service providers will be able to optimise their energy consumption in multiple dimensions including: the node, cluster, system-level and domain-levels. For example, disabling unused components within a service provider’s network will result in noticeable reductions in power consumption.
The vRAN solution by Red Hat and Samsung will be available as a customer proof-of-concept in the latter half of 2023.
QUOTE: Honoré LaBourdette, vice president, Telco, Media, Entertainment & Edge Ecosystem, Red Hat:
“As all industries continue to navigate 5G transformation, we’ve learned that no single vendor can meet the demand for RAN technologies on their own. By extending our collaboration with Samsung, a pioneer in the global vRAN market, we can equip service providers with the necessary scale and efficiency for any given radio network.”
Red Hat and NVIDIA
Red Hat and NVIDIA re teaming up to improve the running of RAN workloads on industry-standard servers. Red Hat OpenShift now supports NVIDIA’s accelerators and its Aerial SDK for 5G virtual RAN and enterprise AI applications.
The companies say that delivers a composable infrastructure to customers, enabling them to better meet the data demands of compute-heavy applications for edge computing, private 5G and artificial intelligence (AI).
NVIDIA GPUs, DPUs and converged accelerators, which combine a NVIDIA Ampere GPU with a NVIDIA BlueField-2 in a single package, can take the load off CPUs by disaggregating compute, storage and networking resources to process packets faster.
It can also reduce the for specialised hardware to provide acceleration to RAN and other use cases.
The SDK – Aerial – is a framework for building software-defined, cloud-native 5G RAN applications while Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes and Advanced Cluster Security help manage and secure multicluster applications. This will put service providers in a better position to meet the data demands of compute heavy applications without sacrificing security capabilities and management.
In the coming year, Mavenir, the end-to-end network software provider, is set to implement Red Hat and NVIDIA technology for its AI-on-5G solution. This pre-packaged network solution will aim to provide a unified single pane of glass with analytics, allowing seamless, cost-effective management and operations of a private 5G network.
QUOTE: Ronnie Vashita, senior vice president, Telecommunications, NVIDIA:
“It’s imperative that service providers adopt a cloud-native infrastructure to meet the growing computing demands of 5G and edge computing. The compute performance of NVIDIA converged accelerators with Red Hat OpenShift enables companies to realize 5G RAN and AI applications in an optimal solution designed to tackle use cases of today and tomorrow.”
