Wind River partners with Dell EMC for 5G vRAN infrastructure use cases

Through a new partnership, Wind River is working with Dell EMC on virtual RAN (vRAN) infrastructure use cases for 5G networks.

Wind River is integrating its software-based Wind River Cloud Platform with Dell EMC's PowerEdge server hardware. Wind River said its Cloud Platform combines a cloud-native, Kubernetes and container-based architecture with the ability to manage a physically and geographically separated infrastructure for vRAN and core data center sites. Cloud Platform features single pane of glass, zero-touch automated management of thousands of nodes.

“As telecom infrastructure continues to evolve, service providers are facing daunting challenges around deploying and managing a physically distributed, cloud native vRAN infrastructure,” said Paul Miller, vice president of telecommunications at Wind River, in a statement “By working with Dell EMC to pre-integrate our technologies into a reference distributed cloud solution, we can cost-effectively deliver carrier grade performance, massive scalability, and rapid service instantiation to service providers as their foundation for 5G networks.”

On the other end, Dell EMC's hardware is suited to low-latency applications do its high compute power, performance and memory, according to Wind River's press release.

Based on a commercial implementation of the open source project StarlingX, Cloud Platform can scale from a single compute node at the network edge up to thousands of nodes in the core. As service providers move more of their networks and compute to the edge, Cloud Platform provides a container-based infrastructure for edge implementations.

“In a 5G world, new services and applications will not be driven by massively scaled, centralized data centers but by intelligently distributed systems built at the network edge,” said Kevin Shatzkamer, vice president of enterprise and service provider strategy and solutions at Dell EMC, in a statement. “The combination of Dell EMC and Wind River technology creates a foundation for a complete, pre-integrated distributed cloud solution that delivers unrivaled reliability and performance, massive scalability, and significant cost savings compared to conventional RAN architectures. The solution will provide CSPs with what they need to migrate to 5G vRAN and better realize a cloud computing future.”

Wind River is showing its Wind River Cloud Platform at this week's KubeCon in San Diego, California.