Red Hat has announced a collaboration with Orange to provide a unified telco cloud foundation for Orange International Networks, integrating its containerised and virtual network functions.
Orange, which began its transformation of international networks eight years ago, has chosen to enhance its cloud infrastructure using Red Hat technologies. Previously, Orange had virtualised over 30 telecommunications functions provided by 12 vendors, including software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN), voice and content delivery networks, and roaming. The approach necessitated a large telco cloud infrastructure, with the capability to maintain latency below ten milliseconds for business-to-business or wholesale customers.
The transition to a cloud-native infrastructure will see the implementation of Red Hat OpenShift as the foundation for cloud-native network functions. This will be complemented by Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, which is aimed at building on Orange's current expertise in virtualised workloads. Additionally, the deployment of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is expected to enable automated deployment and scaling across the network infrastructure.
The collaboration is expected to foster a vendor-agnostic, cloud-native, and automated framework for Orange's international telco cloud infrastructure. This will aid in the softwarization and industrialisation of network services at Orange.
Jean Louis Le Roux, Executive Vice President of International Networks at Orange and Chief Technology and Information Officer at Orange Wholesale, commented: "We've been collaborating with Red Hat in recent years on our extensive and successful network softwarization strategy, achieving flexibility and programmability objectives for services provided to large business and wholesale customers. We have recently selected Red Hat OpenShift for our next generation of telco cloud, and our move to containerization. We are very happy with the first deployments and are moving forward to cover the globe with this new technology. We are ready to host advanced telco services, such as SD-WAN, IoT, voice and mobile core within 10 milliseconds of any customer."
The new platform will accommodate a range of use cases, including SD-WAN, secure access service edge, IMS, 4G and 5G core services, and IoT, along with roaming services. Currently, six new points of presence (PoPs) have been successfully deployed using this platform.
Fran Heeran, Vice President of Global Telecommunications at Red Hat, noted: "The Orange and Red Hat teams have built a close collaboration over the years based on transparency and simplicity. We're delighted to see Orange unlocking significant benefits in stability, resilience and time to market with the use of Red Hat technologies. Orange is a best-practice example of harnessing end-to-end automation and cloud-native orchestration to target large-scale deployments and workload migration to modern infrastructure with the help of Red Hat."
The collaboration promises benefits, including improved operational efficiency with enhanced lifecycle management resulting in near-zero downtime upgrades, and the flexibility to support both virtualised and containerised workloads consistently across various environments. This setup also facilitates faster time-to-market thanks to fully automated deployments, reducing human error risk and accelerating deployment times.
With a goal of increasing its telco cloud infrastructure globally, Orange aims to expand its use of Red Hat OpenShift to 75 telco cloud PoPs within the next two years. This will include transitioning from 50 existing OpenStack platforms and establishing 25 new PoPs. Sustainability goals are also aligned with this initiative as existing equipment will be reused, and power monitoring capabilities in Red Hat OpenShift will aid in reducing the carbon footprint.
The collaboration represents an advancement in the global telecommunications landscape as it builds on existing alliances and joint technical projects between the two organisations. Both Red Hat and Orange continue to strive for increased agility in operations and enhanced service delivery capabilities.
