Red Hat OpenShift drives a strong 5G open RAN ecosystem

As the telecommunications industry ramps up its evolution towards cloud-native architectures and containers, communications service providers (CSPs) are working to scale their networks to support increased demand. In this effort, open radio access network (RAN) solutions offer standardized disaggregation of the RAN, decoupling hardware and software, to give CSPs more freedom of choice. Many organizations are looking to implement a container platform like Red Hat OpenShift that is ready to take on the intensive demands of this evolution for their RAN and for new 5G use cases, such as network slicing, IoT and industrial IoT. Moving to a cloud-native platform creates the opportunity for many of them to work with new suppliers, boost innovation and better differentiate using new operating models. 

Red Hat is excited to play a key role in this transformation. Last year, we shared the news of our expanded collaboration with Altiostar to develop an infrastructure and workload automation framework for a container-based RAN reference architecture that allows a consistent approach to a disaggregated RAN for both our customer and partner ecosystem. We’re now excited to build on this momentum by extending our architecture in collaboration with Mavenir, to transform mobile network infrastructures. 

With this strategic collaboration, Red Hat and Mavenir are able to deliver: 

• Full 5G and RAN functionality using Red Hat OpenShift as cloud-native network function (CNF) infrastructure and 5G core, IMS and open RAN CNF software from Mavenir

• Cooperation on certification, integration and interoperability of Mavenir’s 4G and 5G based core, IMS and virtualized RAN (vRAN) and cloud RAN (cRAN) products with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenShift

• Global collaboration on customer engagements 

Strategic collaborations for radio access network modernization

Red Hat is working consistently with customers and partners to offer one of the strongest open RAN ecosystems available today by enhancing Red Hat OpenShift with the features required to build and deliver a modern open RAN. In addition to our work with Mavenir and Altiostar, we’ve announced collaborations with both Samsung and Intel to drive 5G adoption with Kubernetes-based networking to help CSPs tackle competitive use cases, including 5G core, edge computing, IoT, machine learning and more. Using the Operator Framework, Red Hat and Intel have created the tools to manage FPGA acceleration devices natively within Red Hat OpenShift running on bare metal. This native acceleration support, along with the low latency, real-time Linux kernel underpinning OpenShift, enables open RAN vendors to deliver the performance required by CSPs.

We believe that open, hybrid cloud solutions are the key to successful implementations and broad adoption. Our upstream-first development model helps drive innovation and flexibility and opens opportunities for industry collaboration in this time of disaggregation. CSPs can avoid vendor and architectural lock-in, while benefiting from a comprehensive ecosystem of network services partners. With Kubernetes-based container environments, operators can take advantage of a more secure, simple, scalable and flexible way to use open RAN to help lower capital expenditures and operating expenses. Red Hat OpenShift provides automated deployment and operator lifecycle management (OLM) to make installation, deployment and management simpler. With Red Hat OpenShift CSPs and DSPs can be more agile and competitive, and they can deliver better performance in a smaller footprint with greater network security.