During MWC Vegas, Dell Technologies announced Dell’s first Telecom Infrastructure Blocks co-engineered with our partner Wind River to help communication service providers (CSPs) reduce complexity, accelerate network deployments, and simplify life cycle management of 5G network infrastructure. Their first use cases will be focused on infrastructure for virtual Radio Access Network (vRAN) and Open RAN workloads.

Deploying and supporting open, virtualized, and cloud-native 5G RANs is one of the key requirements to accelerate 5G adoption. The number of options available in 5G RAN design makes it imperative that infrastructures supporting them are flexible, fully automated for distributed operations, and maximally efficient in terms of power, cost, the resources they consume, and the performance they deliver.

Dell Telecom Infrastructure Blocks for Wind River are designed and fully engineered to provide a turnkey experience with fully integrated hardware and software stacks from Dell and Wind River that are RAN workload-ready and aligned with workload requirements. This means the engineered system, once delivered, will be ready for RAN network functions onboarding through a simple and standard workflow avoiding any integration and lifecycle management complexities normally expected from a fully disaggregated network deployment.  

The Dell Telecom Infrastructure Blocks for Wind River are a part of the Dell Technologies Multi-Cloud Foundation, a telecom cloud designed specifically to assist CSPs in providing network services on a large scale by lowering the cost, time, complexity, and risk of deploying and maintaining a distributed telco-cloud. Dell Telecom Infrastructure Blocks for Wind River are comprised of:

• Dell hardware that has been validated and optimized for RAN
• Dell Bare Metal Orchestrator and a Bare Metal Orchestrator Module (a combination of a Bare Metal Orchestrator plug-in and a Wind River Conductor integration plug-in)
• Wind River Studio, which is comprised of:
  • Wind River Conductor
  • Wind River Cloud Platform
  • Wind River Analytics

How do Dell Telecom Infrastructure Blocks for Wind River make infrastructure design, delivery, and lifecycle management of a telecom cloud better and easier?

From technology onboarding to Day 2+ operations for CSPs, Dell Telecom Infrastructure Blocks streamline the processes for technology acquisition, design, and management. We have broken down these processes into 4 stages. Let us examine how Dell Telecom Infrastructure Blocks for Wind River can impact each stage of this journey. 

Stage 1: Technology onboarding | Faster Time to Market

The first stage is the Technology onboarding, where Dell Technologies works with Wind River in Dell’s Solution Engineering Lab to develop the engineered system. Together we design, validate, build, and run a broad range of test cases to create an optimized engineered system for 5G RAN vCU/vDU and Telecom Multi-Cloud Foundation Management clusters. During this stage, we conduct extensive solution testing with Wind River performing more than 650 test cases. This includes validating functionality, interoperability, security, scalability, high availability, and test cases specific to the workload’s infrastructure requirements to ensure this system operates flawlessly across a range of scale and performance points.  

We also launched our OTEL Lab (Open Telecom Ecosystem Lab) to allow telecom ecosystem suppliers (ISVs) to integrate or certify their workload applications on Dell infrastructure including Telecom Infrastructure Blocks. Customers and partners working in OTEL can fine-tune the Infrastructure Block to a given CSP’s needs, marrying the efficiency of Infrastructure Block development with the nuances presented in meeting a CSP’s specific requirements.   

Continuous improvement in the design of Infrastructure Blocks is enabled by ongoing feedback on the process throughout the life of the solution which can further streamline the design, validation, and certification. This extensive process produces an engineered system that streamlines the operator’s reference architecture design, benchmarking, proof of concept, and end-to-end validation processes to reduce engineering costs and accelerate the onboarding of new technology.

All hardware and software required for this Engineered system are integrated in Dell’s factory and sold and supported as a single system to simplify procurement, reduce configuration time, and streamline product support.

This "shift left" in the design, development, validation, and integration of the stacks means readiness testing and integration are finished sooner in the development cycle than they would have been with more traditional and segregated development and test processes. For CSPs, this method speeds up time to value by reducing the time needed to prepare and validate a new solution for deployment.

Now we go from Technology onboarding to the second phase, pre-production.

Stage 2: Pre-production | Accelerated onboarding

From Dell’s Solution Engineering Labs, the engineered system moves into the CSPs pre-production environment where the  golden configuration is defined. Rather than receiving a collection of disaggregated components, (infrastructure, cloud stacks, automation, and so on.) CSPs start with a factory-integrated, engineered system that can be quickly deployed in their pre-production test lab. At this stage, customers leverage the best practices, design guidance, and lessons learned to create a fully validated stack for their workload. The next step is to pre-stage the Telco Cloud stack including the workload and start preparing for Day 1 and Day 2 by integrating with the customer CI/CD pipeline and defining/agreeing on the life-cycle management process to support the first office application deployment.

Stage 3: Production | Automation enables faster deployment

Advancing the flow, deployment into production is accelerated by:

1. Factory integration that reduces procurement, installation, and integration time on-site.
2. Embedded automation that reduces time spent configuring hardware or software. This includes validating configurations and streamlining processes with Customer Information Questionnaires (CIQs). CIQs are YAML files that list credentials, management networks, storage details, physical locations, and other relevant data needed to set the telco cloud stack at different physical locations for CSPs.
3. Streamlining support with a unified single call carrier-grade support model for the full cloud stack.  

Automating deployment eliminates manual configuration errors to accelerate product delivery. Should the CSP need assistance with deployment, Dell's professional services team is standing by to assist. Dell provides on-site services to rack, stack, and integrate servers into their network.

Stage 4: Day 2+ Operations | Performance, lifecycle management, and support

Day 2+ operations are simplified in several ways. First, the automation provided, combined with the extensive validation testing Dell and Wind River perform, ensure a consistent, telco-grade deployment, or upgrade each time. This streamlines daily fault, configuration, performance, and security management in the fully distributed cloud.  In addition, Dell Bare Metal Orchestrator will automate the detection of configuration drift and its remediation. And, Wind River Studio Analytics utilizes machine learning to proactively detect issues before they become a problem.   

Second, Dell’s Solutions Engineering lab validates all-new feature enhancements to the software and hardware including new updates, upgrades, bug fixes, and security patches. Once we have updated the engineered system, we push it via Dell CI/CD pipeline to Dell factory and OTEL Lab. We can also push the update to the CSP's CI/CD pipeline using integrations set up by Dell Services to reduce the testing our customers perform in their labs.

We complement all this by providing unified, single-call support for the entire cloud stack with options for carrier-grade SLAs for service response and restoration times.   

Proprietary appliance-based networks are being replaced by best-of-breed, multivendor cloud networks as CSPs adapt their network designs for 5G RAN. As CSPs adopt disaggregated, cloud-native architectures, Dell Technologies is ready to lend a helping hand. With Dell Telecom Multi-Cloud Foundation, we provide an automated, validated, and continuously integrated foundation for deploying and managing disaggregated, cloud-native telecom networks. 

Ready to talk?  Request a callback.
To learn more about our solution, please visit the Dell Telecom Multi-Cloud Foundation solutions site

Authored by: 
Gaurav Gangwal
Senior Principal Engineer – Technical Marketing, Product Management

About the author:

Gaurav Gangwal works in Dell's Telecom Systems Business (TSB) as a Technical Marketing Engineer on the Product Management team. He is currently focused on 5G products and solutions for RAN, Edge, and Core. Prior to joining Dell in July 2022, he worked for AT&T for over ten years and previously with Viavi, Alcatel-Lucent, and Nokia. Gaurav has an engineering degree in electronics and telecommunications and has worked in the telecommunications industry for about 14 years. He currently resides in Bangalore, India.