California-based compute software vendor Wind River has announced a couple of notable deals; it has deployed a fully-automated edge data centre for Finnish telco Elisa, and also struck a deal with China-based Horizon Robotics to collaborate on edge systems for advanced driver assist systems (ADAS) for vehicles in the automotive supplier’s home market.
It called its work with Elisa in Finland a “milestone in the field of edge computing”. Whether the description is a marker of its own progress, or the progress of the sector as a whole, or both, is not quite clear from its press statement, but the firm said it is Elisa’s its “first fully-automated edge” site and its “second edge site” to launch this year. The project was announced earlier this year, to support low-latency and high-intensity 5G applications. It is geared for its smart-industry push to sell digital change to local enterprises.
A statement said Elisa is going after the telecoms, transportation, healthcare, and manufacturing sectors, among others. In the Elisa setup, the California’s firm’s Kubernetes-based edge/cloud management platform, Wind River Studio, hosts the user plane function (UPF) in the carrier’s core-network, along with its own Studio Conductor orchestration software to automate application deployments in distributed edge-cloud environments. The platform will host “multiple vendors and multiple technologies”, said Wind River.
It said the whole edge-compute arrangement has seen Elisa prepare and deploy the data centre in significantly less time – to “execute hundreds of tests and scripts before going into live network”, and to commission the site for commercial usage. It said testing was reduced by 90 percent compared to manual setup, and deployment was reduced by 50 percent – thanks to the automation of processes in the Wind River software. The solution also reduces the “probability of human errors”, reducing maintenance and enhancing network quality.
Elisa commented: “Constant automation development is key to future success… This strengthens Elisa’s position as the leading digital service provider in automating operations and edge deployments.”
Meanwhile, Wind River’s work with Horizon Robotics to advance smart driving solutions will afford automotive OEMs a fully integrated ADAS hardware/software solution based on Horizon’s Journey series computing solutions and Wind River’s cloud-to-edge portfolio. Horizon’s Journey products cover all scenarios of automated driving, said Wind River; the Chinese firm is to use Winde River’s real-time operating system (RTOS) product, VxWorks, along with its Helix hypervisor-based multi-tenant virtualization platform and Studio management platform.
Horizon said: “The auto industry in China is transforming tremendously, and Horizon continues to create the computational foundation for the era of smart vehicles. We are committed to improving the efficiency and enhancement of automated driving by collaborating with upstream and downstream partners and are honoured to establish this collaboration with Wind River. By leveraging the core capabilities of Horizon and Wind River, we will provide differentiated integrated solutions for OEMs, resulting in safer and optimised mobility for consumers.”
