Building an Open Infrastructure Unified Telecom Cloud; what it means for you.

Building an Open Infrastructure Unified Telecom Cloud; what it means for you.

man climbing on tower near buildings at daytime

Telecom companies face quite a few challenges these days especially regaining market share in relation from public cloud providers. They are adopting fast to become tech-centric and front running companies: think of the technical migration from 4G to 5G and moving cloud computing to their customer at the ‘edge’ of the telco networks.

 

This requires solutions that provide reliable performance at massive scale, support virtual network functions from different vendors without lock-in, and management expertise to manage to ensure maximum availability of its critical services. The only way to provide all these technologies in a consistent way is to build a Unified Telecom Cloud. The Unified Telco Cloud combines several cloud technologies like virtualization, programmable infrastructure, containers, cloud storage and infrastructure services to provide telco services to customers, manage core network functions and provide storage. Open infrastructure components such as OpenStack, KVM, Kubernetes, Ceph, ManageIQ, et cetera provide this unified platform. You can start small with only OpenStack for example and grow the open infrastructure with new functionalities such as container technology or edge orchestration along the ride.

 

When you decide to use Open Infrastructure at the foundation of a central NFVI platform you want to make sure that this software based solution balances open source community innovation with enterprise stability, reliability, and support to efficiently virtualize resources, organize them into clouds, and manage them. After a successful build, you will be able to deploy new VNFs to production. These functions will help for example improve data processing, mobile voice services, create faster and/or more reliable telecommunications services and cut deployment time for new services helping you to stay competitive in the fast-paced global telecommunications market. New application development can be prioritized based on product group requests.

 

Using a software based Open Infrastructure solution also means that you are able to scale out to respond to future growth. The open source based NFV platform offers a lower barrier to entry for software vendors by eliminating lock-in to a single provider and the NFV platform runs on industry standard x86-based servers, helping you to minimize its hardware costs.

 

That sounds all great; but what is the downside to all this?

 

Technically no downside exists; operationally there are some downsides. So you want to build an open Unified Telecom Cloud: Where do you start? You would like to be running production as soon as possible. Who will have the knowledge to build and maintain the Open Infrastructure? When running production you would like to have a stable Open Infrastructure up and running with the correct uptime and SLA. Who will be adding integration with your applications? You would like to integrate the Open Infrastructure with the customer applications you are running.  How will you setup the correct network for the cloud infrastructure? To be successful you want a network with business flexibility, enhanced security, availability, performance, automation, and elasticity. You will need the correct recourses to resolve all these questions.

 

We at Fairbanks International Group can of course help you with this. Fairbanks is an Open Infrastructure company, expert in managing high complex Red Hat, Canonical, Mirantis and Suse infrastructures existing of Cloud Technology (OpenStack), Container Technology (Kubernetes, OKD, OpenShift, Rancher), Storage Technology (Ceph) and Network Technology (Cumulus, NFV, VPP, MANO). By setting up these Unified Telecom Clouds, we help telecom companies with the improvement of operator networks for customer experience, integration with enterprise services for adding new technologies like AI, machine learning, robotics, industrial integration, gaming, manufacturing and enable infrastructure transformation to enable IT modernization, digital optimization, and the invention of new digital business models.

 

When you have any questions about this blog or the Fairbanks Open Infrastructure services, please let me know.

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