Red Hat told Silverlinings that its new collaboration with Tech Mahindra is intended to equip service providers with ready-made workloads that are supported across any cloud landscape to extend 5G and MEC services in hybrid cloud environments.
Ian Hood, chief strategist for global industries at Red Hat said that such oven-ready workloads are intended to get services to market faster. “With the offering from Tech Mahindra and Red Hat, CSPs benefit from a network-as-a-service solution with the built-in capabilities they need to extend 5G and MEC workloads in hybrid and multi-cloud environments. The first use cases we are targeting with [communications service providers] CSPs are private wireless (LTE/5G) and IoT workloads for end users in retail, energy, manufacturing and defense sectors,” he told us in an email.
The firms are using Red Hat’s OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA) with Tech Mahindra netOps.ai software for the offering. Additionally, as part of the system, Casa Systems 5G core functions are running on a combination of ROSA and Red Hat's OpenShift Container Platform at the edge.
Hood would not reveal which service providers are interested in the software yet. “We cannot share any CSPs by name at this point, but Tech Mahindra and Red Hat are in early conversations with several CSPs to implement and enable innovative edge services with this hybrid cloud solution,” he told us.
Patrick Filkins, research manager, IoT and telecom network infrastructure, IDC, told us that the partnership between the two companies is designed to support service providers “looking more into the use of hybrid and multi-cloud that supports network workloads across RAN, core and transport.”
“This is of course reliant on Comms SPs actually adopting cloud-native network functions (CNFs),” the analyst said. “The [standalone] 5G core is cloud-native from the outset, and many Comms SPs are talking to hyperscale cloud providers about hosting 5G core workloads.”
Filkins added, “The 5G core is interesting as we expect some of the 5G core functions (e.g., [user plane function]) to be run at the edge of the carrier network, or even in a private cloud on-premise,” he continued. “The RAN and transport domains, beyond a few greenfield builds, are less likely to happen in the near-term.”
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