Verizon has chosen IBM as an integrator and IBM’s subsidiary Red Hat as the prime supplier for the “Webscale” flavor of its Verizon Cloud Platform (VCP).
Verizon has had its VCP telco cloud for several years with different flavors for the radio access network (RAN), core and edge.
Speaking with FierceTelecom recently, Miguel Carames, Verizon’s director of network and technology planning said, “When we started this virtualization journey, containers were not mature enough to trust for telco workloads.” Instead, Verizon built its VCP using OpenStack software. But its new 5G standalone core is being built with cloud-native software. “Things that are already in OpenStack we will leverage them because we already made the investment, we’ll have that in the network,” he said. “But as we get to end-of-life considerations on hardware, we will be moving legacy to cloud-native as well. Everything that is new will be deployed in cloud native.”
That’s where the Webscale flavor of VCP comes in with today’s news.
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Azhar Sayeed, chief architect for the service provider business at Red Hat told Fierce, “VCP has been around for a long time. That cloud platform was running OpenStack and is one of our largest OpenStack deployments.” But he said the new VCP Webscale is a fully cloud-native containerized platform. He said, “It’s actually running all these 5G workloads in containers."
Sayeed said the new container-based platform using Red Hat OpenShift software is running “side-by-side” with the OpensStack platform for the time being because some services are still running on OpenStack.
In a blog post today, Steve Canepa, global GM and managing director of IBM Communications Sector said, “By working with Red Hat and IBM Global Business Services to build their 5G core network services on Red Hat OpenShift, Verizon is evolving to an open, cloud-native, containerized webscale platform that is ready to harness innovative applications that can support advanced 5G use cases.”
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Last summer Verizon Business and IBM announced they were creating a new monitoring solution for enterprises that combines 4G, 5G and edge computing.