VMware’s telco cloud automation and service assurance offerings also get new features and enhancements
VMware on Thursday announced changes to its telco cloud portfolio that it says will help Communication Service Providers (CSPs) with modernization efforts around 5G, Radio Access Network (RAN) and edge computing deployments. The company’s announcements include Telco Cloud Platform 2.5, Telco Cloud Automation 2.1, and Telco Cloud Service Assurance 2.0.
Misbah Mahmoodi, senior director of product marketing at VMware, recently discussed the new announcements with RCR Wireless News to provide some additional context.
“The key areas that are big concerns for operators today have to deal with operational complexities,” said Mahmoodi. “They’ve started to deploy 5G networks, they’re looking at rolling out virtualized RAN and Open RAN.”
Continuing to manage legacy environments and siloed, vertical technology stacks creates operational complexity with lifecycle management and scale, he added.
“They’re coming back to VMware and saying, ‘Okay, we know that you can provide instantiation, but can you help us on our day or day two operations. That’s become a key value proposition for VMware because we are helping them through their whole journey,” said Mahmoodi. “They are looking to VMware to provide a lot of the automation and orchestration tool capabilities not only for onboarding network functions, both VNF and CNF, but with multiple clouds, edge, and public cloud deployments. They’re looking for a consistent management operations toolset allows them to do this.”
Telco Cloud Platform 2.5 adds separate upgrade paths for control plan and worker node pools, Intrusion Detection and Prevention Systems (IDPS) to protect east-west network traffic, and an expanded partner ecosystem of more than 275 Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) and Containerized Network Functions (CNFs), now including Mavenir’s Converged Packet Core.
“We have a broad marketplace where vendors can see the list of all certified network functions,” explained Mahmoodi. “This is a key value that operators see in VMware. They know that whether they need to deploy a Nokia solution, or Ericsson, Citrix, whoever, that they can be assured the solution has been tested and certified, and that they can accelerate their time to market with the different services need for their networks.”
Telco Cloud Automation is VMware’s network orchestration and automation platform. The new 2.1 release supports Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). This enables CSPS to provision CNFs directly on native Amazon EKS, the company said.
Mahmoodi said that Telco Cloud Automation’s improvements are positioned for VMware’s customers that are now expanding services from the core to the RAN and are looking for a consistent toolset to help them deploy and automate the process.
“What we’re really offering here with Telco Cloud Automation is multi-layer automation,” said Mahmoodi. “It’s the infrastructure automation, so it’s the automation for your compute your storage and networking. It’s the network function management, it’s basically providing a lot of the automation orchestration for the network functions: the instantiation, the lifecycle management, the multi-cloud capabilities of it.”
Bare-metal automation is another key feature of the release.
“We are seeing the need for automation and instantiation right from bare metal. We’re seeing at a Dish, and we’re seeing other telcos, where they want to accelerate the number of sites that they are deploying. They want to have a single-vendor partner that’s able to do kind of all the provisioning and automation, right from bare metal all the way up through the network functions,” he said.
Telco Cloud Service Assurance is VMware’s integrated service monitoring and network management service for its telco cloud offering. It’s had a long row to hoe, Mahmoodi said. VMware bought Dell EMC’s service assurance platform and hired the team back in 2018, eventually renaming it Telco Cloud Operations.
Telco Cloud Service Assurance is the newest name, and VMware has expanded it in this release with new functions and capabilities to manage closed-loop operations for large-scale mobile networks. New use cases supported by the 2.0 release include Communications as a Service (CaaS), 4G and 5G mobile cores, network slicing, and RAN.
“(Telco Cloud Service Assurance) provides a lot of the insights, the visibility, the root cause analysis and the remediation for this stack – the virtualized stack and now the physical infrastructure all the way up to the applications,” said Mahmoodi.
