Dell, Red Hat Deliver Best-in-Class Solutions for Service Providers

At Dell, we are focused on delivering open, disaggregated set of solutions from core to edge, and beyond.   The solutions we create allow service providers to remove proprietary infrastructure, decrease total cost of ownership and automate operations, as they deliver new sets of services and applications to their end customers. While reducing OpEx these solutions also enable service providers to get to revenue quicker, a win-win.

Photo by Fabio Ballasina on Unsplash

Dell and Red Hat have been partners for more than a decade and provide a jointly engineered, deeply integrated and fully-validated OpenStack solution for Service Providers and high-end enterprises. Both companies have dedicated and jointly staffed labs for OpenStack and open source development, testing, and performance engineering.

At this year’s Red Hat Summit in San Francisco, we are excited to announce the latest version of Dell NFV Ready Bundle for Red Hat v10.2 release to further simplify and accelerate OpenStack deployments for Communication Service Providers as well as Managed & Hosting Service Providers and high-end enterprises.

This Ready solution includes pre-integrated bundle of open standards-based Dell Cloud Infrastructure (compute, networking, storage and management tools) options with the Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10 (long-term supported) including highly redundant, software-defined storage delivered by Red Hat Ceph as the default storage option.

While the solution has “NFV” in its name, it delivers rapid and reliable business results for not only Communication Service Providers (CSPs/Telcos), but also Hosting Service Providers, Managed Service Providers (MSPs) as well as high-end enterprise private cloud builders

The solution combines the innovation of OpenStack with fast automated deployment, highly reliable operations and simplified management, has pre-designed scalability for growth for both compute and storage and has full deployment automation to configure the hardware and software in just over an hour (based on internal testing) – consistently and reliably each time.

At its core, significant value is created from the features we have added for service providers, especially the many NFV specific enhancements for CSPs. These include the following:

  1. 14G Hardware Support: This release includes support for our latest 14th generation PowerEdge Servers based on Intel Skylake CPUs. These servers have been shown to have a 30 percent increase in performance and a 78 percent increase in scalability when compared to the previous solution Release with analogous PowerEdge 13G R-series rack servers. (Based on Dell internal benchmark testing, April 2018.)
  2. 25GbE NICs Support: To address the need for faster network throughput and lower latency for CSP use cases, we now fully support Intel XXV710 NICs and Mellanox CX4 NICs.
  3. Introduction of CSP and XSP Profiles: The solution is targeted for not only NFV/CSPs but also for xSPs or other service providers as well such as Hosting/Managed Service Providers, Consumer Web Techs, IaaS/PaaS/SaaS Service Providers. This release introduces the framework for profiles that make it easy to deploy OpenStack for a specific use case. The two profiles provided with this release automatically configure whole solution, SW and HW for the key features of xSP or CSP use cases to provide rapid and consistent deployment in an automated fashion. These are delivered as part of open sourced Jet Pack for ease of customization and adoption for customer specific workload scenarios.
  4. NFV Enhancements: These include several key NFV-specific features that many of our customers are asking for such as SR-IOV, Huge Pages, NUMA & CPU-Pinning, NIC Alignment and OVS-DPDK that are integrated into CSP profile.

Additionally, while the bundle is available as a pre-integrated solution, we fully understand that service providers may need help with implementation of the solution or may need solutions customized for their needs. We make it easy with Dell Professional Services. Dell Professional Services can provide implementation of the bundle in your data center. The service includes hardware rack integration (on- or off-site) plus host operating system and OpenStack software installation.

If you have advanced requirements, Dell offers custom statement-of-work–based OpenStack Cloud Consulting services, including workshops, assessments, design and custom implementation.

Dell and Red Hat have been working together for over a decade, but in many ways we are just getting started. We will continue to integrate capabilities that service providers want to deliver solutions that reduce installation complexity, automate operations, enable seamless delivery new services but above all, provide confidence that the joint solutions are ready to work in production for service providers.

Please visit us in the Dell booth #903 at Red Hat Summit to learn more.


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About the Author: Kailas Jawadekar

Kailas Jawadekar is a Principal Product Manager in Dell EMC’s Service Provider Solutions Group. He is focused on development of solutions that help transform the way service providers architect, design, build, implement and operate their networks with solutions involving Network Function Virtualization (NFV), Software Defined Networking (SDN), Edge Computing, Video Transcoding/CDN, Central Office (CO) infrastructure modernization, Data-driven Automation and Analytics and Service Assurance. Kailas has nearly 20 years of industry experience in Product development, Product Management and Product Marketing roles and holds a Master’s of Business Administration from University of Florida and a Bachelor’s of Engineering from University of Pune, India.