Dell Technologies and Orange jointly agree for Telco MEC innovation

By CIOReview | Monday, May 6, 2019

Dell Technologies and Orange, the forerunners among mobile and internet service providers, have signed a joint memorandum to explore development in distributed cloud architectures to deliver new platforms for the multi-access edge computing (MEC) and 5G.

5G creates new avenues for platforms that sustain MEC and IoT services, providing the best of cloud and mobility services. The companies are collaborating to fulfill demands for 5G by developing new distributed architectures that will ensure a common hardware foundation. The distributed computing will lay out bedrock for automated, agnostic, software-defined infrastructure, extending from on-premise to the radio to the core, speeding up the innovation and service releases.

The new mobile platforms are programmed on a trusted supply chain, which ensures the usage of network telemetry. These real-time performance systems update automation and service orchestration systems, using AI to enable consistent service levels with insights across the distributed system. To summarize, all the network stack layers will be visible to management systems, which will autonomously ensure efficient network operations and customer experience.

5G technologies augmented with cloud and IoT beyond traditional fixed-network systems are creating industry-standard architectures combined with Software-defined networking (SDN), Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), cloud-native applications and MEC. These dynamic, agile computing, storage, and network solutions supply business opportunities that the communication service providers can capitalize on.

The Collaboration of Dell technologies and Orange will elaborate and develop new technologies such as

• MEC use cases, business models and proof of concepts;

• Open source conglomeration and partnerships for edge ecosystem;

• Definition and validation of infrastructure accelerators, such as FPGAs, GPUs, and SmartNICs, for edge workloads, including Cloud/Virtual RAN (CRAN/vRAN), MEC, and real-time, interactive, latency-sensitive applications;

• AI/ML-enabled software to support remote automation of a multi-technology, heterogeneous edge built on virtual machines, containers, and bare metal workloads;

• Edge infrastructure platforms supporting Telco environmental, operational, space, and automation requirements.