VMware announces CSP product innovations and partnerships

VMware has unveiled new product innovations and partnerships that will enable communications service providers (CSPs) to modernise their networks in a cost and energy efficient manner and accelerate 5G core, RAN and edge deployments and lifecycle management.

CSPs are accelerating the pace of 5G and Open RAN deployments to meet the demands of consumers and enterprises as they increase their appetite for ultra-low latency and high speed networks to support their digital transformation. This rapid pace of deployment introduces operational complexities from network lifecycle management to vendor interoperability along with network service assurance, VMware states.

Sanjay Uppal, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Service Provider and Edge, VMware, says, "Today's CSPs find themselves in a unique position in the edge value chain, with the ability to act as principals and provide the most cost and energy efficient path to edge transformation. At the same time, CSPs need to rapidly modernise their networks and deploy overlay services to monetise their investments. VMware's flexibility and consistency in delivering a multi-cloud approach allows our CSP customers to meet this challenge head-on."

VMware Telco Cloud Platform 2.5 with VMware Telco Cloud Automation 2.1 enable CSPs to expedite the innovation cycle to deliver new network services, reduce operational complexities for VNF and CNF onboarding, instantiation, and lifecycle management to achieve substantial TCO savings, the company states.

The latest release of VMware Telco Cloud Platform adds the capability to:

• Upgrade control plane and worker node pools separately, amid management of cluster failures.
• Protect and better secure 5G networks from sophisticated security attacks with intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDPS) for east-west network traffic.
• Accelerate the deployment of network services with an expanding partner ecosystem of over 275 virtualised and containerised network functions (VNFs and CNFs) including Mavenirs Converged Packet Core.

Ashok Khuntia, Mavenir's President Core Networks, says, "The success of 5G rollouts hinges on the ability to disaggregate networks and roll out new services at a faster pace and larger scale.

"With Mavenir's 5G Converged Packet Core certified through the VMware Ready for Telco Cloud program, we were able to quickly validate our CSAR package conformity as well as the steps for onboarding and lifecycle management of our network functions. As a result, VMware and Mavenir will enable CSPs to quickly onboard and deploy network functions resulting in time, money and integration savings."

VMware Telco Cloud Automation 2.1 extends multi-cloud operations and automation capabilities with new support for AWS and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) enabling CSPs to provision CNFs directly on native Amazon EKS.

Marc Rouanne, EVP and Chief Network Officer, DISH Wireless, says, "DISH Wireless has already deployed thousands of edge nodes to build the worlds first hyper-distributed cloud, and its growing exponentially. Our 5G Open RAN network is the first application deployed and supported by VMware Telco Cloud Automation.

"VMware Telco Cloud Automation enables DISH to automate deployment and management of physical and virtual infrastructure and applications, at scale. We, with the help of VMware, can now offer a new platform for developers to stretch the cloud to end devices and create a bridge between hyper-scale clouds."

The latest release of VMware Telco Cloud Service Assurance 2.0 enables new use cases for mobile service assurance, including CaaS, 4G and 5G mobile cores, network slicing, and RAN.

To streamline the testing and proof of concept (PoC) of this software, VMware has expanded its scope of work with its customer DISH Wireless. DISH Wireless is testing VMware's software to monitor its distributed-cloud infrastructure and collect metrics and logs to provide actionable insights and facilitate closed-loop automated provisioning and management.

Brian Mengwasser, Vice President of MarketPlace & Apps Design, DISH Wireless, says, "At DISH Wireless, data is the most valuable product generated by our wireless cloud. We are now trialling VMware Telco Cloud Service Assurance to enhance our ability to collect data from the edge, anticipate issues, maintain high system reliability, and ultimately, expose great value to our enterprise development community."

VMware Telco Cloud Platform RAN 2.0 is designed to accelerate and simplify deployments across distributed RAN sites with cloud-smart automation. This release enables improved performance, operability, and scale, helping accelerate adoption and time-to-launch.

Finally, the addition of VMware Bare Metal Automation provides CSPs with zero touch provisioning and lifecycle management from bare metal provisioning to telco cloud infrastructure and network functions. VMware ESXi enhancements (included in the platform) provide bare metal equivalent latency performance and the flexibility, agility, and security benefits inherent to virtualisation platforms.