Orange recently selected Red Hat to further virtualize and move its telecom services to the cloud. This will be done using Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization and the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.
The international telecom operator has been transitioning its international network environment to a virtual, cloud-based infrastructure for eight years. Through this move, Orange hopes to achieve greater flexibility, cost efficiency and sovereignty within its networks and services.
In total, more than 30 telecom applications have now been virtualized, with support from 12 different vendors. This includes SD-WAN functionality, telephony functionality, the Content Delivery Network (CDN) platform and roaming infrastructure.
Virtualization with Red Hat
To further expand this infrastructure, Orange has decided to partner with Red Hat. The focus is on migrating telecom services to a cloud environment based on Red Hat platforms. This should eventually lead to a vendor-agnostic, cloud-native and automated framework for the Orange telecom cloud and wider adoption of software-based network services.
The new cloud infrastructure is based on Red Hat OpenShift, combined with Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization to enhance Orange’s expertise in virtual workloads. In addition, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is part of the infrastructure and is deployed for automated deployment and scaling functionalities.
More use cases and benefits
Orange says that the collaboration with Red Hat and the integration of its technologies within the international cloud platform enables several new use cases. These include SD-WAN and SASE gateway functionality, as well as IMS, 4G and 5G core technology, IoT services and roaming. Six new (virtual) Points-of-Presence (PoPs) are already running on the cloud platform.
Other benefits of partnering with Red Hat include higher availability and operational efficiency, increased flexibility and scalability to support future developments, reduced time to market, improved network resiliency via Infrastructure as Code (IaC), better security capabilities and reduced carbon emissions.
Also read: Red Hat OpenShift 4.18 expands virtualization options
SUSE also chosen
Orange also highlights a partnership with SUSE during MWC. A CaaS (Communications-as-a-Service) platform based on Sylva is supported on a commercial basis by SUSE. The platform can host network functions from Core to RAN.