Telefónica picks Wind River's virtualized cloud platform for UNICA project

Telefónica put Wind River's virtualized cloud platform through the paces of its NFV Reference Lab ahead of giving it the official stamp of approval for use in the telco's UNICA project.

Telefónica validated Wind River's Titanium cloud virtualization platform as a virtualized infrastructure manager (VIM) for NFV workloads in UNICA. Telefónica, which offers services and operations across Latin America and Europe, first started working on UNICA four years ago to move away from legacy networks by installing virtualization technologies through NFV while also implementing software-defined networking (SDN) and cloud technologies.

While some service providers are relying on the Open Networking Automation Platform (ONAP) for orchestration, virtualization and automation, Telefónica's UNICA work in NFV is aligned with the European Telecommunications Standards Institute's NFV strategy for Open Source MANO (OSM).

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Over the past few months, Telefónica has started to broaden the depth of UNICA by concentrating its efforts on edge cloud computing use cases such as virtual RAN, multi-access edge computing (MEC) and 5G applications. Last summer, Telefónica announced it was working with Ericsson to offer customers network slicing on private networks via the UNICA cloud platform.

“5G applications will increasingly demand low latency, and computing will often need to happen much closer to the end device. It was important to select an infrastructure platform that was optimized for edge use cases,” said Telefónica's Javier Gavilan, core network, platforms and transport director, in a prepared statement. “After careful and comprehensive evaluation, Wind River Titanium Cloud stood out for its unique differentiators, such as extreme low latency and high reliability, to effectively meet the technical challenges that accompany telco cloud compute.”

In its lab, Telefónica conducted a multi-phase evaluation that included comprehensive functional testing of the Titanium Cloud virtualization platform. Test teams also validated the integration of Titanium Cloud with OSM orchestration to prove interoperability. Telefónica is conducting use case trials, including testing virtual RAN solutions hosted on Titanium Cloud.

Wind River has worked with BT, China Mobile, and China Telecom on multiple projects, among other service providers.