Dell Technologies unveiled an initiative at Mobile World Congress 2023 in Barcelona that it said is designed to “simplify today’s disaggregated telecom landscape.”
That simplification will occur, it said, through the Dell Open Telecom Ecosystem Community that will bring together telecom partners and communications service provider (CSPs), leveraging the Dell Open Telecom Ecosystem Lab to expedite the delivery of telecom offerings.
As part of the announcement, the company revealed new collaborations with technology partners Amdocs, Juniper Networks, Nokia, Qualcomm, Microsoft and Samsung to accelerate the adoption of open, cloud-native technologies.
Dell said in a release, “the telecom industry is transforming to an open and application-agnostic ecosystem, allowing communications service providers (CSPs) to integrate innovative applications and services into their networks and deliver more revenue-generating services to their customers.
“Multicloud technologies have become a fundamental pillar to support this ecosystem, eliminating vendor-siloed infrastructure stacks, providing efficient operations and developing a future-proof network foundation to pave the way for 6G and beyond.”
The agreement with Microsoft will see the two organizations collaborate in a strategy to “redefine the deployment and operations” of multicloud disaggregated networks.
“Network operators are looking to adopt cloud technology to modernize and monetize the network, lowering network total cost of ownership, driving operational efficiency and resiliency and improving security,” said Yousef Khalidi, corporate vice president, Azure for Operators, at Microsoft. “Our collaboration with Dell helps us deliver an innovative, carrier-grade platform to operators that are looking to deploy the next generation of network technology.”
Details of the other five partnerships are as follows:
- Nokia and Dell have formed an agreement to integrate and validate an offering combining Nokia’s 5G Cloud RAN (radio access network) software and Cloud RAN SmartNIC in-line Layer 1 accelerator card with Dell’s open infrastructure, including Dell PowerEdge servers.
- Dell and Samsung are collaborating to solve Open RAN challenges and support what they described as “seamless multi-vendor solution integration. Samsung will work alongside Dell to integrate Samsung’s virtualized central unit (vCU) and virtualized distributed unit (vDU) software with Dell PowerEdge XR8000 and XR5610 servers, which are purpose-built for RAN environments and provide the performance and power consumption characteristics required in RAN deployments.”
- Qualcomm and Dell are collaborating to develop a 5G virtualized distributed unit (vDU). Dell PowerEdge XR8000 and XR5610 servers, purpose-built for telecom and enterprise edge use cases, combined with the Qualcomm X100 5G RAN Accelerator Card with commercial-grade Layer 1 software, offer a high-performing, cost-effective and energy-efficient solution for OEMs and network operators deploying virtualized and Open RAN technologies, a release stated.
- Dell and Amdocs are working together to accelerate the deployment of 5G Stand-Alone (5G SA) core networks.
- Dell is collaborating with Juniper on a certified product offering that “provides a simple and direct path to server consolidation and power reduction at cell sites. CSPs aim to reduce their carbon footprint and energy consumption while addressing the growing demand of a digitally connected world.”
Dennis Hoffman, who leads the telecom systems business at Dell, said CSPs want “to use open solutions in their networks that enable them to leverage various combinations of hardware and software to meet the specific needs of their network services. The RAN portion of the network requires specific features from infrastructure and software to support this highly-demanding, business-critical workload.”