Beyond carrier-grade: How Red Hat helps to open up telco innovation with OpenStack

“Carrier-grade” is, effectively, a label that one time stood for reliability in telecommunications software - with it, a solution was expected to deliver redundancy and have “five nines” availability. This is a complex way of saying it works, it doesn’t fail often, and when it does break it can be fixed quickly. This is obviously important, as uptime is critical to telecommunications providers, as is the capability to handle extreme data and systems workloads.

But is this all that modern telecommunications providers need? Just uptime and fat pipes?

We believe that answer is a resounding “No!” Uptime and reliability should be expected, like you expect a car to have headlights and brakes. Modern telecommunications providers want to innovate, to effect real change for their customers and to build offerings that help them differentiate their services in a competitive global market. For Red Hat, innovation means open source and, from our perspective, for more and more telcos, this means OpenStack, the massively-scalable, fully-open, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform that helps telecommunications providers build and scale services like a public cloud.

As the world’s leading provider of open source solutions and technologies, we understand open source, and we certainly understand OpenStack. Through Red Hat OpenStack Platform, we’re delivering a fully-open and open standards-based cloud infrastructure solution that helps telecommunications providers deliver innovation alongside the uptime that their customers simply expect. How are we doing this?

Red Hat is demystifying OpenStack for telcos
With ease-of-installation improving with each community release, OpenStack becomes even easier to deploy at scale with Red Hat OpenStack Platform director, a lifecycle management platform for OpenStack that bridges the design and planning, installation and ongoing operations steps of an OpenStack-based cloud. Red Hat Consulting services help telecommunications providers deploy network functions virtualization infrastructure (NFVI) through our Cloud Practice and Telecommunications Practice, with backup from Red Hat’s award-winning support teams and our robust partner ecosystem, which includes industry leaders like Nokia, Ericsson, Juniper Networks, HPE and Cisco.

Red Hat is driving OpenStack in production
“OpenStack is not for production” is one of the most outdated myths about the technology. Red Hat alone has more than 500 customers running OpenStack today across industries, including carriers such as Verizon and Turkcell. But this success isn’t just limited to OpenStack - as a cloud platform, OpenStack provides an excellent platform for additional innovation, including adding cloud-native applications through containers and using microservices to further advance next-generation service offerings. For example, running Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform on Red Hat OpenStack Platform provides a solid, flexible and scalable platform to innovate at scale for a wide range of use cases, including bringing new telco offerings to bear for end users.

Red Hat delivers more flexibility than proprietary technologies
Legacy proprietary technologies offer a comfort level to the IT organizations powering telecommunications providers - they may not like the stuff, but they know how it works and how it responds. But familiarity can breed complacency which, in today’s telco world, can lead to extinction. By using open source to modernize infrastructure, adopt network function virtualization (NFV) and drive new application development capabilities, telecommunications providers adopting Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat’s broad portfolio of telco-ready solutions can be better prepared to meet the future of their business head-on.

Red Hat, and its partners, know what telcos want
Red Hat is a major contributor to not only the OpenStack project, but also the OpenDaylight and OPNFV projects, communities that are playing a major role in opening up the networking and NFV spaces with common, interoperable standards. Beyond this community leadership in the technologies affecting the evolution of telecommunications providers, Red Hat has more than 30 certified virtualized network functions (VNF) partners to offer a deeper integration with NFV, creating a more solid deployment foundation for mission-critical operations.

So if you’re ready to take the next step beyond “carrier-grade” to become an open, future-ready telco, Red Hat is here to support you. Learn more about how Red Hat is supporting the future of the telecommunications industry here or visit us at OpenStack Summit Sydney, November 6-8, 2017.