Nokia moves cloud infra and container ops to vendor to support 5G, core, MEC and RAN services via OpenShift and OpenStack
Nokia and Red Hat have agreed to “tightly integrate” Nokia’s core network applications with Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat OpenShift. They will jointly support, evolve and, in time, migrate customers who use Nokia Container Services (NCS) and Nokia CloudBand Infrastructure Software (CBIS) to Red Hat’s platforms.
Further, Nokia will use Red Hat’s infrastructure platforms “to enable faster development and testing of Nokia’s…core network portfolio”.
Nokia will continue to support its customers directly, but Red Hat will provide Nokia with ongoing development, services and care for Nokia NCS and CBIS.
They say they will provide a smooth migration path for customers who choose to move to Red Hat’s platforms. In addition, certain Nokia cloud infrastructure teams – about 350 employees – will transition to Red Hat to continue “roadmap evolution, deployment services and support on behalf of Nokia to its customers”.
Those teams are: R&D, portfolio management within it: product development teams; service teams who are responsible for delivering the platform to customers as part of projects: and care and support, at what Nokia describes as Levels 3 and 4. Nokia will maintain the first levels of support and work closely with Red Hat on technical support.
The rationale given for the tie-up was that “as service providers explore the opportunities with 5G, including core network, open RAN, multi-access edge computing (MEC), application modernisation and more, they require greater flexibility and options to deploy applications and services on the infrastructure and location of their choice.
“This means integration and interoperability amongst the ecosystem is critical.” In addition to the shifts outlined above, Nokia will certify Nokia’s cloud-native network functions (CNFs) for the core network and virtualised network functions (VNFs) on Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat OpenStack Platform.
Fran Heeran said, “Nokia’s focus on building the best network applications…in terms of the three main pillars to core. Whether it’s voice, packet core, data, and the subscriber data management portfolios, we want a solution where, going forward, for those customers that wanted the full stack, there was a best of breed solution.”
Nokia stressed that if, in future, a customer wants to buy any of the Nokia software covered by this deal they will have to use Red Hat.
Heeran explained, “There’s a population of customers and a fairly sizable one, who wants their application suppliers – the suppliers of the core network – to bring the solution end to end. That’s hardware, cloud infrastructure and the applications themselves…if the customer has wants…the full solution and they have no stated preference,…we will supply Nokia plus Red Hat.”
He added, “There’s also a population of customers that may…make separate choices in terms of infrastructure – obviously, the hyperscalars are coming into this market as well…and for those situations, with Nokia we will be fully supporting deployment of our applications on those other platforms as well. So it’s kind of a best of both worlds, with the full stack solution coming with Nokia plus Red Hat. And then there’s also a choice to deploy Nokia applications on what we would call CaaS [Containers-as-a-Service] platforms or third party CaaS, platforms as well.”
Darrell Jordan-Smith at Red Hat said, “There is no lock-in. What we’re trying to derive from this [introduce] a completely open source solution into the marketplace.” He added, “We’ve got to demonstrate our abilities and our capabilities, both technically and from a services perspectiv
e, to earn our right to participate and engage those clients.”
“We do see in this marketplace, having a common platform, such as Red Hat OpenStack, or Red Hat OpenShift, with all of the tooling and other elements that we provide around…enabling a lot of our clients and customers to land and deploy, not just Nokia’s applications, which will be highly tuned and focus on Red Hat as a core platform but other telco-based workloads,” he continued. “We’re seeing convergence in the market place…a lot of customers wanting to leverage the telco cloud into their OSS/BSS workloads as well and IoT environments.
“We think that having a common platform enables our customers to move fast and move confidently into where they need to go and how they need to scale.”
Customers’ deployment options will include bare metal, virtualised and public cloud telco infrastructure, such as those from AWS, Google, Microsoft and others. Red Hat is owned by IBM.
Nokia cloud infrastructure platform customers will have the service and support of Red Hat’s open source ecosystem and access to Red Hat’s 4G and 5G technologies and use cases.
Heeran acknowledged that it is difficult for telco vendors to address application lifecycle management across the diversity of cloud platforms and infrastructure that operators deploy. He added, “This is also why this agreement is very important for us. Where we see the market going, there’s a lot of choice of hardware on cloud infrastructure. And particularly, we’re now between two generations of technology” – the virtual and cloud world, with virtual network functions (VNFs) still the most widely deployed.
“ There’s a finite limit to how many options we’re going to be able to support… that’s why partnering with Red Hat in this instance…as a market leader with the platform…was really important,” Heeran added. “There’s going to be demand to have an openness to deploying third parties.
“We would like to see the landscape getting a little bit simpler and having a little bit less choice…eventually things have to settle and mature. That played into our thinking in this relationship with Red Hat, a drive towards that simplicity, of being able to focus on a smaller number of platforms, but also be able to deliver exactly what our customers want.”
So, “By combining Nokia’s 5G expertise with Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud vision, customers will be able to transform their core network infrastructure and applications to be fully cloud-native and future-ready with service and support from Red Hat as the industry accelerates to the edge.”
Jordan-Smith summed up. “trying to simplify and accelerate the deployment of technologies in these areas are really at the heart of what we’re trying to achieve.”