Ericsson, Intel partner to develop software defined infrastructure for 5G era

Ericsson and Intel Corporation have begun a multi-year collaboration to align ongoing development efforts in software-defined infrastructure (SDI) and Intel® Rack Scale Design.

The resulting next-generation infrastructure management platform will deliver a new level of cloudlike agility, transparency and efficiency required for Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), distributed cloud, and 5G.

Many communications service providers have already started transitioning to standards-based servers to reduce infrastructure costs. However, others need additional management capabilities to streamline operations and fast-track delivery of new services, in order to realize the full potential of their infrastructure.

Ericsson and Intel are teaming up to deliver a next-generation hardware management platform that extends the agility of the cloud to the hardware infrastructure layer. For service providers, the new infrastructure management solution will help speed time-to-market, maximize utilization, and reduce total cost of ownership.

As part of the multi-faceted agreement, the companies will align development efforts of Ericsson SDI Manager software and Intel® Rack Scale Design (Intel® RSD) and extend these solutions with advanced management capabilities. These unified development efforts will allow operators to leverage multi-vendor hardware options, Ericsson’s end-to-end software solutions, and Intel’s latest architectural innovations.

Lars Mårtensson, Head of Cloud & NFV infrastructure, Business Area Digital Services, Ericsson, says: “We have long history of successful collaboration with Intel. This new collaboration will focus on software in addition to hardware and we see it to be truly transformative for service providers’ ability to successfully deploy open cloud and NFV infrastructure, from centralized datacenters to the edge. Intel’s and Ericsson’s joint efforts significantly strengthens the competitiveness and roadmap of the Ericsson Software Defined Infrastructure offering.”

Sandra Rivera, Senior Vice President, Network Platform Group, Intel, says: “5G will be transformative, accelerating today’s applications and triggering a wave of new usages and edge-based innovation. Our infrastructure manageability collaboration with Ericsson will help communications service providers remove deployment barriers, reduce costs, and deliver new 5G and edge services with cloudlike speed on a flexible, programmable and intelligent network.”

As part of the collaboration, Ericsson and Intel will converge Ericsson SDI Manager software and Intel RSD reference software while maintaining full backward compatibility for current customers. Jointly-developed software and hardware innovations resulting from the collaboration will be offered in subsequent Ericsson hardware platforms and may also be offered with Intel’s server products which are sold through other partners and in other industry segments.

Ericsson SDI system is based on Intel RSD and provides a common managed hardware pool for all workloads that dynamically scales and enables fast service rollout, performance optimization and efficient hardware utilization. Intel RSD is an industry-wide architecture for disaggregated, composable infrastructure that fundamentally changes the way a data center is built, managed, and expanded over time.

The companies will show the Ericsson SDI Manager at Mobile World Congress 2019 in Barcelona, February 25-28.