At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last week, VMware announced a comprehensive 5G Telco Cloud platform that will support both 4G and 5G, helping service providers get to “5G-Ready” faster.
“5G is at a massive inflection point, and planning decisions made today will have far reaching financial and operational ramifications for CSPs going forward,” said Shekar Ayyar, executive vice president, strategy and corporate development and general manager, Telco NFV Group, VMware.
“By moving away from the inflexible, hardware-defined architectures of the past, and rolling out 5G as a fully-virtualised architecture right out of the gate, telcos will be able to beat competitors to market with new value-added services and improve the performance and operational efficiencies of their networks.”
VMware announced new and enhanced solutions spanning the company’s telco portfolio that help ease migration to 5G without sacrificing performance or monetisation of existing networks. These include:
- VMware Smart Assurance 10, which will provide full integration with VMware vCloud NFV, VMware’s NFV Infrastructure (NFVI) platform, along with new carrier-oriented advancements in VMware NSX-T Data Centre.
- VMware NSX-T Data Centre, a core component of vCloud NFV that provides a software network overlay across the complete NFV infrastructure and supports multiple telco use cases. The new VMware NSX-T 2.4 release delivers higher levels of cloud-scale, operational simplicity, resiliency, and performance. This includes IPv6 support, near line-rate speed, high availability, and scalability to tens-of-thousands of unique networks per NSX-T Data Centre instance.
- VMware HCX, which enables CSPs to build hybrid highways interconnecting heritage infrastructure and 5G environments on which commercial OpenStack ecosystem workloads can be migrated to the new distributed, multi-cloud architecture. VMware HCX delivers migration capabilities that can be integrated into Day 1 and Day 2 operations, helping CSPs seamlessly mobilise the applications to 5G with minimum downtime. VMware Integrated OpenStack (VIO), with VMware’s support for Kubernetes orchestration complement VMware HCX in delivering migration and multi-cloud connectivity.
- *Project Photon has released Photon OS 3.0, a minimal lightweight Linux operating system (OS), that provides an open, flexible, and stable foundation for , IoT, and modern application environments.
- VMware Pulse IoT Centre and Photon OS can now support multiple IoT use cases across the value chain of organisations with a consistent, secure and scalable infrastructure. Running the VMware Pulse IoT Centre agent with Photon OS on IoT devices enhances the security of these otherwise highly vulnerable devices with , DNS, and security token services. Additionally, VMware Pulse IoT Centre’s over-the-air update capabilities can deliver security patches and BIOS updates to IoT devices as well as updates to the Photon OS running on edge devices. VMware Pulse IoT Centre and Photon OS also support the implementation of containerised applications such as data analytics and data filtering, among others, close to the point of data origination in IoT use cases.