Telcos can get an edge to deliver demanding new services with hyperconvergence technology

The telecommunications industry is preparing for a very different world – one where power at the edge of service providers’ networks will be critical. Consumers and businesses alike increasingly want to take advantage of new technologies like connected vehicle communications and immersive virtual reality experiences. But these applications require real-time processing, low-latency connections and, in many cases, a new network infrastructure.  

These demanding new services must be deployed closer to their own locations for greater speed of delivery and enhanced efficiency, which has a cascading effect on service providers’ systems architecture. To that end, many service providers are making the move to hyperconverged infrastructure, which combines software-defined infrastructure on the same white-box host.

451 Research’s Voice of the Service Provider survey, reveals that 57 percent of telecom service providers will deploy hyperconverged platforms over the next year, a rise of nearly 20 percent from those who currently leverage it, as a simpler provisioning solution.

The survey also notes that there is interest in open networking projects. The open source OpenStack tool set typically serves service providers as the way to build and manage private and public cloud computing platforms, and as such, it is seen by many in the industry as necessary for successfully implementing network functions virtualization (NFV) in hyperconverged environments.

Co-locating compute and storage functions in an OpenStack-enabled private cloud environment can improve application portability between the datacenter and the edge. Converging those layers can help private clouds to increase elasticity, scalability, and self-service – features commonly associated with public clouds – and it can have a tremendous effect on enabling services innovation for communications service providers.

Red Hat paves the way for service providers to achieve this with Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Cloud. The solution makes it practical for service providers to bring power to the edge of their networks through its consolidation of compute and storage functions for modern workloads in a container-based, higher-efficiency, smaller-footprint model with simplified lifecycle management – all while providing cost-savings through the use of commodity hardware. It comes as a pre-packaged solution that combines the highly scalable Red Hat OpenStack Platform, for managing hyperconverged resources, together with hardware-independent, programmable Red Hat Ceph Storage, which provides unified support for block, object, and file storage.

Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Cloud can be deployed all the way down the service provider stack, from core datacenters and central offices to edge and remote point of presence (PoP) environments, with the assurance of support through a single vendor relationship with Red Hat. That’s a great help, since these deployments can be complicated and service provider edge technicians might not have enough knowledge to identify issues that could prevent their systems from deploying as expected.

Organizations in every industry “are being told to digitally transform, to become more agile, and to respond to the business faster in order to survive in a highly competitive market,” writes ESG senior analyst Mike Leone in a recent blog. Modernizing infrastructures to deliver a more cloud-like experience on-premises is one way to do it, he notes, and hyperconverged infrastructures provide an architecture and compelling benefits to reach that goal.

Ready to explore how hyperconverged infrastructure can benefit your business? Check out our use cases to learn more.