Simplifying 5G rollout?

Open Distributed Infrastructure Management helps resolve the complexity that telcos face in rolling out 5G networks across thousands of sites equipped with IT infrastructure from multiple vendors and different generations of technology. This new initiative underlines HPE’s continued leadership in open 5G technologies and commitment to accelerating industry alignment through open source innovation.

Working with partners, HPE’s 5G portfolio promises to unleash the potential of 5G at the network core, at the edge, and in the enterprise. This initiative is being launched in collaboration with Intel and with support from key industry leaders including AMI, Apstra, Red Hat, Tech Mahindra and World Wide Technology. HPE alongside Intel plans to initiate an open source project under the Linux Foundation to further develop the initiative in conjunction with ecosystem partners to enable end-to-end automated management of networks. HPE is committed to developing and fostering the ecosystem and supporting customers by contributing infrastructure manageability code to the open source community.   

5G represents a huge shift in the way mobile networks are built. Previous generation networks were largely built on proprietary systems, but 5G standards have been designed to utilize open software platforms operating on commercial off-the-shelf servers. The trend towards open distributed technologies like virtualized radio access networks (vRAN), multi-access edge computing (MEC) and cloud-native network functions  will require the deployment of industry standard compute, storage and networking infrastructure from multiple vendors across potentially thousands of geographically distributed locations. Today, most data center physical infrastructure management solutions do not scale geographically or support multi-vendor deployments, resulting in operational inefficiencies and inhibiting technology innovation.

The Open Distributed Infrastructure Management initiative simplifies network management and drives significant operational and financial benefits. It supports large scale, geographically distributed networks and facilitates interaction between disparate multivendor infrastructure resources. The HPE Open Distributed Infrastructure Management Resource Aggregator models infrastructure elements in every site to simplify infrastructure automation across resources, vendors and geographical locations.

HPE will launch this commercially supported version of the open source infrastructure manageability function along with associated infrastructure-specific plug-in components in Q2 2020. The HPE solution will leverage industry-defined specifications, including DMTF Redfish® interfaces, to enable a vendor-neutral approach for managing configuration and operations of compute, storage and networking infrastructure resources across multiple vendors at scale.

“5G and Edge Computing industry initiatives will require large-scale and geographically distributed multivendor infrastructure deployments that can only be cost effectively realized with infrastructure-as-code automation,” said Claus Pedersen, VP, Telco Infrastructure Solutions at HPE. “The Open Distributed Infrastructure Management initiative tackles network scalability challenges and the costs associated with vendor lock-in by enabling multivendor infrastructure deployments, the centralized deployment of standards-based fault and configuration management, and the aggregation of resource-specific status information.”

“Infrastructure management and orchestration can benefit from common open source building blocks including APIs and data models,” said Dan Rodriguez, Corporate VP and GM of Intel’s Network Platforms Group. “The ODIM initiative builds upon the work we have done with HPE on top of Redfish and will ultimately help Communications Service Providers and Enterprises discover and unleash the full potential of the underlying technologies in their distributed deployments.”

“This initiative proposes new DMTF Redfish® extensions that will provide a path forward for the creation of powerful new software-defined data center paradigms that enable end-to-end network automation, said IDC GVP, Ashish Nadkarni. “This open standards-based initiative offers organizations a way to converge multivendor hardware resources under a unified infrastructure management solution, promising to accelerate both 5G rollout and innovation across the industry.”

The HPE Open Distributed Infrastructure Management Resource Aggregator offers key innovations that will benefit other telco solutions including the recently announced HPE telco core and edge infrastructure blueprints. Delivered as-a-service with HPE GreenLake, these infrastructure offerings provide telcos with a fast ramp for rolling out 5G service across multiple sites.

With key components of the Open Distributed Infrastructure Management initiative planned for open source release, HPE and key industry leaders are creating an ecosystem that will accelerate technology innovation beyond the telco industry. Telco infrastructure today is unique in terms of its distribution and scale. Deployment of industrial IoT and new levels of automation and distributed data-analysis will over time make the Open Distributed Infrastructure Management initiative relevant for solving similar problems in many other industries and application domains.

As a founding member of the DMTF Redfish® open source initiative, HPE is well placed to provide leadership in this space. A recent AvidThink report concluded that there is a need for a standards-based approach to large scale distributed physical infrastructure management. This applies to telco networks, but is also very relevant across many other verticals, including large enterprises with geographically distributed datacenters.