Red Hat and O-RAN Alliance accelerating cloud adoption at the Edge

In telecommunication, bringing compute resources and intelligence closer to users improves the user experience, significantly reduces service provider costs, and unlocks the innovation needed to deliver compelling services that increase revenue. However, telecommunication service providers are faced with challenges when adopting new technologies, methodologies, and automation. Every option must be evaluated for compatibility with a radio access network (RAN). Solving these challenges are the reasons Red Hat has been collaborating and contributing to the O-RAN Alliance.

Red Hat is committed to advancing the open radio access network (O-RAN) ecosystem through contributions to open source projects, and industry collaboration. Red Hat is collaborating on critical O-RAN interfaces, fostering a robust hardware partner ecosystem, working with service management and orchestration (SMO) providers, and making ongoing contributions to vital open source O-RAN initiatives. These contributions, of course, all end up in Red Hat's cloud-native products.

Foundational principles

Red Hat's O-RAN strategy is built on four core principles, all underpinned by open source collaboration.

Cloudification

Adoption of cloud-native methodology drives down operational costs and increases reliability of deployment and ongoing management of O-RAN clusters for thousands of nodes at the edge. Cloud-native server clusters span from service provider IT systems, the core, and now to the edge. With AI becoming a part of many deployments, cloud-native principles are more important than ever. Adoption of cloud-native principles in the service provider market has been a challenge, and is a barrier to lower operational expenditure (OpEx).

Metal3

The Metal3 project is part of the CNCF set of projects and establishes the foundation for innovation and alignment across the hardware ecosystem. Metal3 provides components for bare metal host management with Kubernetes. By leveraging baseboard management controllers (BMC) to interact with lower-level functions, Metal3 enables fully automated hardware management through the O-Cloud manager and the O-RAN O2 interface for infrastructure management services (O2-IMS) API.

Vibrant and robust SMO ecosystem

Red Hat works with a number of SMO providers and the O-RAN community to grow the adoption of SMO as the model for managing the O-Cloud lifecycle. The SMO enables the service provider to orchestrate their intended infrastructure changes and application level changes from a single pane of glass. O-RAN is defining the key attributes and APIs of the SMO.

Broad O2-IMS API applicability

While the O2-IMS API is specific to the telecommunications industry, it addresses challenges common across various verticals, including financial services, and government.  

O-cloud architectural approach 

The following diagram illustrates the Red Hat O-cloud architectural approach within the O-RAN framework, highlighting the interplay between key components:

• SMO: Service management and orchestration
• O2-IMS/O2-DMS: Interfaces for infrastructure management services and deployment management services.
• Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes: Red Hat solution for end-to-end management, visibility, and control of multiple clusters
• O-Cloud manager: Manages the O-Cloud environment
• Node clusters: Comprising Red Hat OpenShift for container-as-a-service (CaaS) and servers with BMC

Providing thought leadership and direction

Red Hat's primary goals for O-RAN reflect our dedication to openness, interoperability, and innovation:

• Achieve compliance with the O-RAN specifications and test suites in areas aligned with the community.
• Cultivate an ecosystem of hardware partners to enable open API integration.
• Collaborate with partners on the SMO interface via the O2-IMS API.
• Contribute to O-RAN thought leadership and future direction.
• Contribute to the O-RAN software community software stack and compliance suite.

Red Hat recently achieved a major milestone: 100% compliance to the O-RAN O-Cloud test suite with the latest version of the Red Hat O-Cloud Manager operator. This operator provides the following five functions:

1. Inventory visibility with O2-IMS for the SMO
2. Server reservation
3. Basic input/output system (BIOS) settings (day 0/day 2)
4. BMC/BIOS version updates (day 0/day 2)
5. Hardware ecosystem enablement through Metal3

These new capabilities enable clusters to be deployed, configured, and maintained directly from the SMO without the need to interact directly with the servers or the Kubernetes clusters. These capabilities drive down operational expenses from day 0 through the lifecycle of the cluster.

Community collaboration and open source projects

Red Hat is deeply engaged with the O-RAN community and contributes to many open source projects, from the kernel to the cloud-native computing foundation (CNCF) projects, all of which support the O-RAN vision.

O-RAN Alliance working groups (WG)

Red Hat is actively engaged in O-RAN WG-6 cloudification and WG-11 security. We participate in weekly and face-to-face meetings to influence the community's direction, with Red Hat's contributions of change requests (CR) and our role as a voting member in WG-6.

O-RAN software community (SC)

Our contributions to the ORAN-SC include:

• Maintaining OKD (Origin Community Distribution of Kubernetes) builds to enable O-RAN continuous integration (CI) jobs and continuous testing.
• Contributing to ORAN-SC compliance tests.
• Maintaining Solostron builds to enable O-RAN CI jobs and continuous testing.  Solostron contains OpenShift/OKD compatibility projects for Open Cluster Management.
• Contributing to relevant upstream operators and components.

O-cloud proof-of-concept (PoC) integration and evolution

Red Hat's vision for O-RAN is founded in open collaboration and technical innovation, with a clear strategy to enable the next generation of service provider infrastructure. Red Hat is committed to working with our partners and the wider community to make this vision a reality. Red Hat's investments in the O-RAN space are aligned with our OpenShift Platform Plus roadmap.

Working on an open radio access network

Red Hat believes that O-RAN built on a common cloud platform provides a robust evolution path to achieve lower OpEx, higher flexibility, and gives access to compelling innovations in progress in various standardization and industry groups.

We encourage you to test the latest version of the Red Hat O-Cloud Manager operator, and we welcome any feedback through GitHub issues.  We have posted a demo video of Red Hat O-Cloud Manager in action, showing full deployment of an O-Cloud from an SMO, configuration of a cluster, BIOS updates, and firmware updates.

We look forward to continued collaboration in the O-RAN community with the wider eco-system and feedback on the O-Cloud Manager operator.