Cloud software company SUSE has released its reference architecture for the integration of the OCUDU disaggregated RAN software stack with its Telco Cloud.
SUSE Telco Cloud is designed for telecommunications providers to build, operate, and manage cloud-native network infrastructure. It is aligned with the requirements of Project Sylva, the set of specifications for a common telco cloud being led by a small group of operators, most notably Orange.
SYLVA provides a standardised platform around Kubernetes, with the aim of reducing integration complexity.
SRS is a RAN software developer that was bought by Rohde & Schwarz in March 2026, and has open sourced its RAN stack via the US-government backed OCUDU programme.
Now SUSE has shown how it integrated SRS’ OCUDU stack onto the SUSE Telco Cloud platform – releasing documentation for its Project Sylva Reference Architecture with SUSE Telco Cloud and OCUDU RAN Stack.
A blogpost from SUSE outlined three problems that a SUSE/OCUDU integration could solve.
“The first is the lack of standardised reference architectures which forces custom, site-specific integration work for every new deployment, binding CSPs to individual vendor roadmaps and increasing complexity. Second, existing open source telco infrastructure has historically fallen short of the extreme performance, deterministic latency, and resiliency requirements demanded by modern RAN workloads, especially those incorporating AI. Third, managing distributed edge environments with consistent operations remains difficult when each site uses different hardware platforms and deployment processes.”
This instance of the SUSE and SRS stack is developed on Intel Xeon 6 SoC processors and Supermicro edge servers, with SUSE Telco Cloud providing the operating system and Kubernetes infrastructure layer. SUSE Rancher Prime supplies unified orchestration and management across distributed edge sites. At the workload layer, OCUDU delivers AI-native, software-defined Central Unit (CU) and Distributed Unit (DU) network functions supporting O-RAN Split 7.2. The aim is clearly to enable hardware and platform portability.
SUSE said, “This architecture directly addresses the fragmentation and lock-in challenges outlined earlier by providing operators with a standardised, portable, and consistent operating model.”
A Sylva-based platform encourages portability between hardware vendors, Kubernetes implementation, infrastructure supplier and cloud providers meaning that RAN software becomes less dependent on a specific infrastructure vendor. Directionally, this is where many operators say they want to end up – the discussion has been around how to get there.
The long-term challenge for Cloud RAN is to arrive at an operational model for, potentially, thousands of distributed cloud sites reliably and economically. The infrastructure must support continuous software updates, security patching, observability, and multi-vendor interoperability without requiring bespoke engineering at every location.
Project Sylva addresses this operational layer by defining a common, cloud-native telecom infrastructure. It has received support from SUSE, and also publicly from Red Hat Nokia and Ericsson too are members of the project which is led by Europe’s Big Five operators: Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telecom Italia, Telefonica and Vodafone.
SUSE and Parallel
The company has previously outlined how it had integrated Parallel Wireless’ RAN stack onto the cloud. At MWC 2026 the two companies demonstrated the integration of Parallel Wireless’ GreenRAN – its name for its cloud-native RAN software platform – creating a carrier-grade production RAN platform. Taking advantage of Parallel’s Unity RAN software capabilities, the integration could sit on any hardware or underlying chip platform, including Intel, AMD and ARM-based systems.
Suse Telco Cloud (STC) is responsible for the discovery of the bare-metal systems, the provisioning and lifecycle management of the Operating system, and the Kubernetes clusters. Then the Parallel Wireless SMO orchestrated deployment and deploys each Radio Technology and application, including configuration and mapping of the remote radio heads (RRH), deployment of RAN network functions, and orchestration of PW RAN containers.
Cloud RAN has made meaningful progress over the past five years, but the industry is still in the transition from early deployments to large-scale operational maturity. SUSE’s work is clearly intended to enable the shift to making it operationally efficient and economical across multiple vendors and hardware platforms, as well as manageable horizontally across a network.
