How Dell Telecom Infrastructure Blocks are Simplifying 5G RAN Cloud Transformation
Thu, 08 Dec 2022 20:01:48 -0000
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5G is a technology that is transforming industry, society, and how we communicate and live in ways we’ve yet to imagine. Communication Service Providers (CSPs) are at the heart of this technological transformation. Although 5G builds on existing 4G infrastructure, 5G networks deployed at scale will require a complete redesign of communication infrastructure. 5G network transformation is undergoing, where more than 220 operators in more than 85 countries have already launched services, and they have realized that operational agility and accelerated deployment model in such a decentralized and cloud-native landscape are considered a must-have to meet customer demands for new innovative capabilities, services, and digital experiences for both Telecom and vertical industries. This is accompanied by the promise of cloud native architectures and open and flexible deployments, which enable CSPs to scale and enable new data-driven architectures in an open ecosystem. While the initial deployments of 5G are based on the Virtualized Radio Access Network (vRAN), which offers CSPs enhanced operational efficiency and flexibility to fulfill the needs of 5G customers, Open RAN expands vRAN's design concepts as well as goals and is truly considered the future. Although O-RAN disaggregates the network, providing network operators more flexibility in terms of how their networks are built and allowing them the benefits of interoperability, the trade-off for the flexibility is typically increased operational complexity, which incurs additional costs of continuous testing, validation, and integration of the 5G RAN system components, which are now provided by a diverse set of suppliers.
Another aspect of this growing complexity is the need for denser networks. Although powerful, new 5G antennas and RAN gear required to attain maximum bandwidth cover substantially less distance than 4G macro cells operating at lower frequencies. This means similar coverage requires more 5G hardware and supporting software. Adding the essential gear for 5G networks can dramatically raise operational costs, but the hardware is only a portion of these costs. The expenses of maintaining a network include the time and money spent on configuration changes, testing, monitoring, repairs, and upgrades.
For most nationwide operators, Edge and RAN cell sites are widely deployed and geographically dispersed across the nation. As network densification increases, it becomes impractical to manually onboard thousands of servers across multiple sites. CSPs need to create a strategy for incorporating greater automation into their network and continue service operations to ensure robust connectivity, manage to expand network complexities, and preserve cost efficiencies without the need for a complete "rip and replace" strategy.
As CSPs migrate to an edge-computing architecture, a new set of requirements emerges. As workloads move closer to the network's edge, CSPs must still maintain ultra-high availability often 5-6 nines. Legacy technology is incapable of attaining this degree of availability.
Scalability, specifically down to a single node with a small footprint at the edge. When a single network reaches tens of thousands of cell sites, you simply cannot afford to have a significant physical footprint with many servers. As a result, the need for a new architecture that can scale up and down grew. As applications grow more real-time, ultra-low latency at the edge is required. CSPs need in-built lifecycle management to perform live software upgrades and manage this environment. Finally, CSPs are demanding more and more open-source software for their networks. Wind River Studio addresses each of these network issues.
Wind River Studio Cloud Platform, which is the StarlingX project with commercial support, provides a production-grade distributed Kubernetes solution for managing edge cloud infrastructure. In addition to the Kubernetes-based Wind River Studio Cloud Platform, Studio also provides orchestration (Wind River Studio Conductor) and analytics (Wind River Studio Analytics) capabilities so operators can deploy and manage their intelligent 5G edge networks globally.
Mobile Network Operators who adopt vRAN and Open RAN must integrate cloud platform software on optimized and tuned hardware to create a cloud platform for vRAN and Open RAN applications. Dell and Wind River have worked together to create a fully engineered, pre-integrated solution designed to streamline 5G vRAN and Open RAN design, deployment, and lifecycle management. Dell Telecom Infrastructure Blocks for Wind River integrate Dell Bare Metal Orchestrator (BMO) and Wind River Studio on Dell PowerEdge servers to provide factory-integrated building blocks for deploying ultra-low latency, vRAN and Open RAN networks with centralized, zero-touch provisioning and management capabilities.
Key Advantages:
- Reduces the complexity of integration and lifecycle management in a highly distributed, disaggregated network, allowing lower operating costs while reducing time to deploy new services while accelerating innovation.
- Dell's comprehensive, factory-integrated solution simplifies supply chain management by reducing the number of components and suppliers needed to build out the network. In addition, to back-haul optimization by preloading all software needed for day-0 and day-1 automation.
- It has been thoroughly tested and includes design guidance for building and scaling out a network that provides low latency, redundancy, and High Availability (HA) for carrier-grade RAN Applications.
- Simplified support with Dell providing single contact support for the whole stack including all hardware and software from Dell and Wind River with an option for carrier-grade support.
- Reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO) for CSPs by deploying a fully integrated, validated, and production-ready vRAN/O-RAN cloud infrastructure solution with a smaller footprint, low latency, and operational simplicity.
Wind River Studio Cloud Platform Architecture
Wind River Studio Cloud Platform Distributed Cloud configuration supports an edge computing solution by providing central management and orchestration for a geographically distributed network of cloud platform systems with easy installation with support for complete Zero Touch Provisioning of the entire cloud, from the Central Region to all the Sub-Clouds
The architecture features a synchronized distributed control plane for reduced latency, with an autonomous control plane such that all sub-cloud local services are operational even during loss of Northbound connectivity to the Central Region (Distributed cloud system controllers cluster location) which is quite important because Studio Cloud Platform can scale horizontal or vertical independent from the main cloud in the regional data center (RDC) or in National Data center (NDC).
Cell Sites, or sub-clouds, are geographically dispersed edge sites of varying sizes. Dell Telecom Infrastructure Blocks for Wind River cell site installations can be either All-in-One Simplex (AIO- SX), AIO Duplex (DX), or All-in-One (AIO) DX + workers. For a typical AIO SX deployment, at least one server is needed in a sub-cloud. Remote worker sites running Bare Metal Orchestrator are where sub-clouds are set up.
- AIO-SX (All-In-One Simplex) - A complete hyper-converged cloud with no HA, with ultra-low cloud platform overhead of 2 physical cores and 64G Memory, and 500G Disk, which is required to run the cloud, while the rest of the CPU cores, memory, and disk are used for the applications.
- AIO-DX (All-In-One Duplex) - Same as AIO-SX except that it runs on 2 servers to provide High Availability (HA) up to 6-9's.
- AIO-DX (All-In-One Duplex) +Workers - Two nodes plus a set of worker nodes (starting small and growing as workload demands increase)
The Central Site at the RDC is deployed as a standard cluster across three Dell PowerEdge R750 servers, two of which are the controller nodes and one of which is a worker node, The Central Site also known as the system controller, provides orchestration and synchronization services for up to 1000 distributed sub-clouds, or cell sites. Controller-0, Controller-1, and Workers-0 through n are the various controllers in the system. To implement AIO DX, both Controller-0 and Controller-1 are required.
Wind River Studio Conductor runs in the National Data Center (NDC) as an orchestrator and infrastructure automation manager. It integrates with Dell's Bare Metal Orchestrator (BMO) to provide complete end-to-end automation for the full hardware and software stack. Additionally, it provides a centralized point of control for managing and automating application deployment in an environment that is large-scale and distributed.
Studio Conductor receives information from Bare Metal Orchestrator as new cell sites come online. Studio Conductor instructs the system controller (CaaS manager) to install, bootstrap, and deploy Studio Cloud Platform at the cell sites. It supports TOSCA (Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Application) based blueprint modeling. (Blueprints are policies that enable orchestration modeling.) Studio Conductor uses blueprints to map services to all distributed clouds and determine the right place to deploy. It also includes built-in secret storage to securely store password keys internally, reducing threat opportunities.
Studio Conductor can adapt and integrate with existing orchestration solutions. The plug-in architecture allows it to accommodate new and old technologies, so it can easily be extended to accommodate evolving requirements.
Wind River Studio Analytics is an integrated data collection, monitoring, analysis, and reporting tool used to optimize distributed network operations. Studio Analytics specifically solves a unique use case for the distributed edge. It provides visibility and operational insights into the Studio Cloud Platform from a Kubernetes and application workload perspective. Studio Analytics has a built-in alerting system with the ability to integrate with several third-party monitoring systems. Studio Analytics uses technology from Elastic. co as a foundation to take data reliably and securely from any source and format, then search, analyze, and visualize it in real time. Studio Analytics also uses the Kibana product from Elastic as an open user interface to visually display the data in a dashboard.
Dell Telecom Multi-Cloud Foundation Infrastructure Blocks provides a validated, automated, and factory integrated engineered system that paves the way for the zero-touch deployment of 5G Telco Cloud Infrastructure, to operation and management of the lifecycle of vRAN and Open RAN sites, all of which contribute to a high-performing network that lessens the cost, time, complexity, and risk of deploying and maintaining a telco cloud for the delivery of 5G services.
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.