News

Dell Technologies Partners with Orange for New-Age Software-Defined Mobility Coming with 5G

• By David Ramel
• 05/14/2019

Dell Technologies and Orange are exploring new technology areas -- such as near real-time edge computing and IoT services -- to meet the demands coming with 5G.

5G, just being rolled out, provides next-gen mobile Internet connectivity at speeds never attained before, resulting in new distributed cloud architectures, new use cases and new services. The companies are teaming up to explore how to deal with all of that.

"5G will require a new breed of platforms supporting a rich catalogue of near real-time edge computing and IoT services," the companies said in a recent news release that states they "will collaborate on meeting demands for new distributed architectures for 5G that combine the best of cloud and mobility. These distributed architectures will provide a common hardware foundation of automated, agnostic software-defined infrastructure, extending from on-premise to the radio to the core, to accelerate innovation and service delivery."

The partnership is just the latest to address the coming software-centric, 5G new order, with notable collaborations around 5G and software-defined wide-area networks (SD-WAN) recently being announced between Verizon and Cisco and AT&T and VMware.

Dell Technologies and Orange, a mobile and Internet services provider with some 264 million customers worldwide, say they will combine their telecommunications expertise to test and develop 5G use cases and business models and team up for "multi-access edge computing and supporting technologies for software-defined mobility with distributed, multi-cloud and edge architectures."

Specifically, the Dell Technologies/Orange pact will entail an effort to define and develop:

• Edge technology use cases, business models and proof of concepts
• Open source consortia and partnerships for the 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, space, operational and automation requirements.

"We're working closely with Orange to combine our joint Telco best practices with decades of data center transformation experience to help service providers re-tool their operations to quickly and profitably roll out new 5G services," said Tom Burns, senior vice president, Dell EMC Networking & Solutions. "For 5G and Telco cloud services, service providers are turning to IT-proven technologies such as IaaS, virtualization, and standardized infrastructure to deliver the required agility, security and control."