Company Updates

Accelerating OpenStack Deployment with Dell and Red Hat

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Service providers everywhere are challenged by growing CAPEX and OPEX for existing network infrastructure, long time to market for new or updated services, price and margin erosion in existing businesses models and slowing innovation to capture new revenue opportunities. To address these challenges, service providers globally are looking to transform their datacenters from proprietary and rigid architectures to a disaggregated model with open architectures which allows them to increase infrastructure flexibility, efficiency and scalability.

Dell and Red Hat have been working together for over a decade to provide jointly engineered and fully-validated solutions to help service providers with this transformation. At the OpenStack Summit in Berlin, we are excited to announce the latest version of Dell Ready Architecture for Red Hat OpenStack Platform v13.0 release for Communications Service Providers as well as Managed & Hosting Service Providers and high-end enterprises.

At its core, we have added several new enhancements to help service providers rapidly deploy OpenStack. These include:

  1. Support for Red Hat OpenStack 13 Queens Release: Red Hat OpenStack 13 is the latest release and includes several key enhancements:
    1. All Red Hat OpenStack Platform services are now containerized including OpenStack Networking (Neutron), OpenStack Block Storage (cinder), and OpenStack Shared File Systems (Manila).
    2. Red Hat OpenStack Director supports fast forward upgrade from Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10 to Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13.
    3. Real-Time Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) integration and Real-Time KVM Compute role for NFV workloads to support guests with stringent latency requirement.
    4. OpenDaylight is a flexible, modular and open SDN platform that is now fully supported with this release.
  2. Support for Dell S5428-ON Switch: The S5248-ON is a fixed form factor top-of-rack switch offering multiple options of 25GbE SFP28 ports for in-rack server and storage. The S5248-ON key features include enhanced buffering, higher forwarding tables and hardware support for Layer 3 VXLAN while continuing to support Open Networking.
  3. Cumulus Linux Networking OS: To support our service providers who tend to be Linux savvy and want to use Layer 3 Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) Ethernet VPN (EVPN) fabric for data centers, this release  supports Cumulus Linux as the networking OS running on top of Dell S5248 Open Networking Switches.
  4. NFV Enhancements: We continue to enhance our NFV features and add new features that many of our customers are asking for. These include enhancements such as OVS-DPDK, Neutron enabled SR-IOV, MTU support starting with jumbo frames, and Neutron DVR.
  5. Additionally, Dell continues to have the one of the most comprehensive of Ironic driver coverage for bare-metal provisioning on Dell servers and covers IPMI, iDRAC and RedFish drivers. Dell also is the first server vendor to have Red Hat Bare Metal certification for PowerEdge servers (in addition to Red Hat OpenStack Platform, Linux and GlusterFS).

While Dell Ready Architecture for Red Hat OpenStack Platform is intended as a baseline conversation starter, we fully understand that service providers may have standardized on an architecture that includes their best practices. Dell makes customization of the solution easy with our Professional Services offerings targeted specifically to address their requirements.

Looking ahead, Dell and Red Hat together will continue to integrate capabilities that service providers want to reduce installation complexity, automate operations, enable seamless delivery new services.

Would you like to learn more? Then please come see us in the Dell booth B12 at OpenStack Summit, Berlin.

About the Author: Kailas Jawadekar

Kailas Jawadekar is a Principal Product Manager in Dell EMC’s Service Provider Solutions Group. He is focused on development of solutions that help transform the way service providers architect, design, build, implement and operate their networks with solutions involving Network Function Virtualization (NFV), Software Defined Networking (SDN), Edge Computing, Video Transcoding/CDN, Central Office (CO) infrastructure modernization, Data-driven Automation and Analytics and Service Assurance. Kailas has nearly 20 years of industry experience in Product development, Product Management and Product Marketing roles and holds a Master’s of Business Administration from University of Florida and a Bachelor’s of Engineering from University of Pune, India.