Cloud

Speeding up Production-Level NFV Deployments With Dell EMC and VMware

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As the industry gets ready for MWC-Americas, we at Dell EMC have also been getting ready. At the event we will be showcasing our latest pairing with VMware geared for Communications Service Providers and Mobile Operators—our Dell EMC NFV Ready Bundle for VMware. You might have heard that VMware is on a roll with a win @ Vodafone. The combination of the VMware software, vCloud NFV Platform, tested and validated on Dell EMC server, storage and networking infrastructure makes for a simplified solution to accelerate NFV deployments.

The influx of new applications make mobile communications an essential element of our everyday life and businesses. However, legacy network infrastructure can’t keep up with the pace of change. The adoption of cloud services and the increasingly competitive landscape with Over-The-Top-Providers offering value-added services on traditional Communication Service Provider (CSP) infrastructure creates financial and operational challenges resulting in increased pressure on these service providers.

Numerous technologies, open source initiatives, competing infrastructure/standards and the lack of an eco-system make it difficult for them to venture into a transformation journey. The current options available to them are at the extremes: too restrictive with full stack architectures or too disaggregated requiring a Do-It-Yourself (DIY) approach. The Dell EMC NFV Ready Bundle for VMware addresses this challenge by providing the best of both worlds with a platform comprising disaggregated elements from the leaders of their respective portfolios.

Introducing Dell EMC NFV Ready Bundle for VMware

Dell EMC, the leader in compute, storage and open networking, is collaborating with VMware, the virtualization and software-defined storage (SDS) market leader, to bring best-of-breed solutions designed to run CSP mobile workloads based on x86 infrastructure. Dell EMC offers the best-in-class infrastructure with their server, storage and networking products. These products offers a scalable, automated and secure platform for traditional and cloud-native workloads.

The Dell EMC NFV Ready Bundle for VMware includes open standards-based Dell EMC Cloud Infrastructure (compute, networking, Service Assurance Suite and management tools) and a choice of a Virtual Infrastructure Manager (vCloud Director or VMware Integrated OpenStack) with vSAN or Dell EMC ScaleIO.  For more details, a spec sheet can be found here.

Dell EMC and VMware are working together to reduce the risk for new CSP workloads adoption: Next Generation Access, Network Operations, OSS, Network Edge and 5G Networks. Each of these areas are going through disruption spanning architecture, technology, operations and workforce transformation. Dell EMC and VMware are combining efforts with several vendors, open source communities and standard bodies to take a leadership role in this journey to accelerate the transformation and adoption process.

We are working with traditional Network Equipment Manufacturers, software-only vendors and System Integrators to validate these workloads on Dell EMC NFV Ready Bundle for VMware. These collaborations result in completely tested and validated solutions with rapid deployment guides, scalability and sizing guide with benchmarking for accelerated quoting of the Build-of-Material along with worldwide deployment services from Dell EMC.  This provides a total care solution from Dell EMC based on the VMware vCloud NFV Platform.

We have done the hard work by building a carrier-grade foundational platform to minimize adoption time and cost while significantly reducing time to service from months/weeks to days/hours. The Ready Bundle provides a single point of contact for total care from Dell EMC. Ease-of-ordering, ready-to-use customizable solutions for long life cycle support of all components is facilitated with seamless customer experience responsible for all components and world-class professional services to accelerate the adoption cycle.

We look forward to becoming a partner to help facilitate the CSPs in their transformation journey.

About the Author: Kevin Shatzkamer

Kevin Shatzkamer is Vice President and General Manager, Service Provider Strategy and Solutions at Dell Technologies with responsibility for strategy and architectural evolution of the intersection points of network infrastructure technologies, cloud and virtualization platforms, and software programmability. His organizational responsibility encompasses industry strategy and investment analysis, business development and go-to-market activities, technical architecture and engineering, and infrastructure evolution / futures-planning. He is also responsible for leading the Dell Technologies 5G strategy in close collaboration with industry-leading telecommunications providers globally. Mr. Shatzkamer represents Dell Technologies on the World Economic Forum (WEF) Global Futures Council on New Network Technologies (5G-related). Mr. Shatzkamer's ecosystem-wide, experience-centric approach to working with customers allows for the identification and exploitation of synergies between disparate organizations to derive new technology / business models for the mobile industry, especially as “5G” defines transformation from technical architecture to ecosystem and service offerings. With over 20 years of industry experience, Mr. Shatzkamer joined Dell EMC in 2016, with prior experience at Brocade (Service Provider CTO, Head of Brocade Labs) and Cisco (Distinguished Systems Engineer). He holds more than 50 patents related to all areas of work. He received a Bachelor’s of Science from the University of Florida, a Master’s of Business Administration from Indiana University, and a Master’s of System Design and Management from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Mr. Shatzkamer is a regular speaker at industry forums and has published two books discussing the architectures and technologies shaping the future of the Mobile Internet (2G, 3G, and 4G networks), from RAN to services.