HPE announced on Tuesday it's working with Intel and the Linux Foundation on a new open source software project to help automate the roll out of 5G across multiple sites.
The new partnership, which will be under the Linux Foundation umbrella, is called the Open Distributed Infrastructure Management Framework. The partnership represents HPE's move into the 5G core network space as it branches out from its enterprise roots. Other partners for the open source project include AMI, Apstra, IBM's Red Hat, Tech Mahindra and World Wide Technology.
HPE will also introduce an enterprise offering, the HPE Open Distributed Infrastructure Management Resource Aggregator.
The Open Distributed Infrastructure Management Framework was designed to simplify network management while also driving operational and financial benefits. It supports large-scale, geographically distributed networks across multiple hardware devices.
The Open Distributed Infrastructure Management Resource Aggregator models infrastructure elements in every site to simplify infrastructure automation across resources, vendors and geographical locations.
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HPE will launch the commercially supported version of the open source infrastructure manageability function along with associated infrastructure-specific plug-in components in the second quarter of this year. HPE said it would tap into industry-defined specifications, including DMTF Redfish interfaces, "to create a vendor-neutral approach for managing configuration and operations of compute, storage and networking infrastructure resources across multiple vendors at scale.
"It's an interesting ecosystem standards play with Intel and HPE, and with it going into the Linux Foundation," said Lee Doyle, principal analyst with Doyle Research. "This is solving how the network compute, edge and storage all work together using NFV, containers and other virtualized applications by leveraging something that's been out there for a while which is a standard called Redfish."
In order for it to be ultimately successful, Doyle said the new HPE open source project will need buy-in from some of the major service providers, none of which were mentioned in Tuesday's press release.
"It's all about getting a ecosystem of service providers," Doyle said. "You also need server vendors and networking suppliers to buy into this."