Red Hat and Ericsson announced a collaboration for validating network functions and platforms to enable service providers to bring next-generation services to market faster in a multi-vendor scenario.
The companies are immersed in a broader ecosystem collaboration to simplify the integration of different technologies and suppliers since multi-vendor networks require proven interoperability to maintain flexibility and choice, according to the two companies.
“Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud platforms are tested to run Ericsson’s network functions – which together make up a pre-defined reference configuration – that helps reduce the deployment complexity of distributed networks,” Måns Burman, heading of partnering and alliances at Red Hat and Magnus Gall, global account director at Red Hat wrote in a blog post. “We are investing significant joint engineering work, to get our combined technologies ready for commercial deployment in a demanding service provider network environment.”
The companies have now validated solutions that empower service providers with an open platform that extends across a network for vEPC, 5G Core, IMS, OSS and BSS. The teams at both companies have been integrating Ericsson’s network function solutions with Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat OpenStack Platform.
Another ongoing project is a collaboration for Cloud RAN where Red Hat participates in Ericsson’s Open Lab for interactive innovation with Ericsson Cloud RAN customers and ecosystem partners around the world.
“Our technical collaboration projects begin with addressing the Ericsson network functions’ requirements for the Red Hat infrastructure, together with a pre-defined networking blueprint and the compute requirements,” Burman and Gall continued. “This is done to ensure the platform’s capabilities for onboarding and hosting of the network functions, as well as to define an initial joint target reference configuration.”
The target reference configuration is then deployed in a joint engineering lab environment and subject to an extensive set of test cases in which testing engineers make adjustments to the target reference configuration.
The software baseline, deployment guides and blueprints for the validated reference configuration of the network functions and platform are then fully documented along with the test case results.
These tested reference configurations are done to help limit the need for local system integration activities, de-risk the project and save time to market.
Additional details on the collaboration are available here.
