Our appreciation for building blocks starts when we’re young. How many of us, for example, have watched a child play with Lego blocks® and thought, “There’s a future engineer.” While it’s only playful speculation, it’s more than just intuition. Engineers tend to think in terms of building blocks even as adults, whether it’s an OSI stack or a network topology.
Of course, there’s a big difference between building a rudimentary castle and, say, a telco cloud. If the first one gets breached, you can usually chase off the intruders with an imaginary dragon or two. The stakes are considerably higher, and the remedies less simple, for a tier one telco cloud network.
But that doesn’t mean we can’t make it simpler to build telco clouds. In fact, that’s exactly what Dell Technologies and Wind River have set out to do with joint reference architectures and, most recently, our Dell Telecom Multicloud Foundation. And today, we are taking it one step further with the announcement of Dell Telecom Infrastructure Blocks for Wind River. These infrastructure blocks are pre-integrated, pre-validated, pre-sized and pre-packaged blocks of hardware and software that are engineered systems designed to support specific telco cloud use cases. The first Telecom Infrastructure Blocks will support vRAN and Open RAN virtualized centralized units (vCU), distributed units (vDU) and management controllers for Telecom Multicloud Foundation with more to follow. And they are all backed by unified support from Dell Technologies.
Not Just Another Chip Off the Block
The idea of a prepackaged block of infrastructure isn’t new; it dates back to converged and hyperconverged infrastructure solutions such as VxRail. Where Telecom Infrastructure Blocks differ is that they’re built, not for generalized IT workloads, but specifically for cloud-native, telecom workloads. Today, no other vendor is offering something like this. Yes, there are other hardware vendors that are developing reference architectures with telecom solutions vendors. And there are hyperscalers that offer some level of infrastructure automation. But, Dell Technologies is the first and only company¹ to bring to market an engineered system co-developed with Wind River, a global leader in software for mission-critical intelligent systems, that is designed and factory integrated to host telecom workloads at scale with automation and single call support for the full hardware and software stack. Dell Telecom Infrastructure Blocks for Wind River address complex CSP challenges in deploying and managing a physically distributed, ultra-low-latency cloud-native infrastructure for intelligent edge networks.
Later this year, Dell and Wind River will begin shipping Telecom Infrastructure Blocks direct from Dell’s factory with pre-configured hardware and pre-loaded software including Wind River Studio. Bare Metal Orchestrator is integrated with Wind River Studio to support discovery, inventorying and future upgrades of the infrastructure in a service provider’s network. Wind River Studio delivers single pane-of-glass management, orchestration, automation and analytics that help service providers optimize their cloud infrastructure. Together, Dell Technologies and Wind River create a complete, end-to-end solution for 5G RAN and edge deployments that can be sized to any workload and scaled easily on demand – all backed by a unified support model from Dell Technologies.
A 5G Solution That Works Right Out of the Box
Dell Telecom Infrastructure Blocks are designed to accelerate telecom transformation by allowing service providers to quickly deploy a best-of-breed cloud-native infrastructure featuring solutions from the industry’s leading vendors. As opposed to network transformations of the past, which were often tied to a single vendor’s roadmap for the future, no single vendor will “own” the telco cloud. The ability to mix and match industry-standard hardware, open-source software, and emerging tools from cloud software developers will be critical to the success of 5G.
Dell Infrastructure Blocks simplify cloud adoption by:
-
- Delivering integrated solutions straight from the factory to reduce costs, deployment time and risk
- Leveraging the cloud experience of Dell Technologies and our cloud partners to jointly build pre-configured solutions around specific workload requirements based on extensive testing and industry best practices
- Offering unified support from Dell Technologies for the entire cloud hardware/software stack
This joint solution with Wind River is the first of what is planned as a series of Telecom Infrastructure Blocks featuring cloud software from other Dell partners. Each block will be aligned with specific 5G use cases and integrated to work as a single, seamless cloud solution based on Dell’s Telecom Multicloud Foundation. We’re very excited about the future of 5G and look forward to making that future happen sooner for service providers around the world. I guess, in one sense, you could say it’s the realization of a childhood dream.
For more information or to contact a business advisor, please visit the Dell Telecom Multicloud Foundation solutions site.
1 Based on Dell analysis of publicly available information, July 2022.
