Digital transformation and technology modernization aren’t trends that are limited just to the enterprise world. Behind the walls of proprietary stacks, many telecommunications service providers also want to use open innovation to evolve their infrastructure and services in an agile, flexible fashion. But these closed stacks are a problem and one that extends from the core datacenter all the way to the central offices.

Central offices are the local “hubs” of many telecommunications networks, often handling “last-mile” operations like telephone switching, copper, and optical terminations. These operations lean on purpose-built equipment that can be rigid and complex. Coupled with a lack of open standards, these devices can struggle to interact with each other, making the life of operations teams in central offices harder, especially in the face of demand for modern services expected from 5G. These differentiated services increasingly require virtualized environments and computing power at the network edge, leading to substantial demand for resources, flexibility and operational simplicity.

Bringing open technologies to these scenarios is a challenge, but it’s one that Red Hat is ready to meet with our new Red Hat virtual central office solution. It provides a blueprint for modernizing telecommunications operations at the network edge via an open, software-defined infrastructure platform. Service providers can readily slot Red Hat’s portfolio of open standards-based products as well as technologies from our robust ecosystem of certified partners into this pluggable framework.

Red Hat virtual central office solution encompasses several critical use cases for residential, business and mobile services, including broadband access, software-defined wide area networks (SD-WAN) and mobile broadband. These scenarios can also extend to include other use cases like voice over LTE (VoLTE). Essentially, Red Hat’s solution enables telecommunications service providers to manage existing services and prepare for the future, all while modernizing their central offices on open standards and enterprise-grade technologies designed to “just work” together.

From a product standpoint, Red Hat virtual central office solution encompasses:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform, which provides the foundational bedrock for additional technologies like virtualization and private cloud.

• Red Hat OpenStack Platform, Red Hat’s massively-scalable Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering built on the popular OpenStack project. Red Hat OpenStack Platform provides the scalability and flexibility needed to meet the vast network needs of telecommunications service providers.

• Red Hat Openshift Container Platform, the industry’s most comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes platform, provides full-stack automated operations to help manage hybrid and multicloud deployments while optimizing developer productivity and helping to more easily bring emerging, open innovation into production systems.

• Red Hat Ansible Automation, Red Hat’s agentless automation technology, which helps automate complex, routine tasks that can prove to be stumbling blocks in managing expanding networks.

• Red Hat Ceph Storage, an open, software-defined storage technology designed for object storage and cloud infrastructure. Ceph Storage offers a scalable, flexible storage option for modern telco operations at scale.

Beyond Red Hat technologies, Red Hat virtual central office solution also incorporates a broad set of technologies from Red Hat’s partner ecosystem. Participating partners at launch include Affirmed Networks, Altiostar, Amdocs, Cumulus Networks, F5 Networks, HPE, Inspur, Intel, Kaloom, Metaswitch, MYCOM OSI, Tech Mahindra, Trilio and World Wide Technology.

To learn more about Red Hat virtual central office solution, visit https://www.redhat.com/vco, stop by the Red Hat booth at OpenStack Summit Berlin (B1) or attend the Red Hat virtual central office solution session at OpenStack Summit Berlin at 11 a.m. local time on Wednesday, Nov. 14.