WWT, Dell Launch 5G Center of Excellence
Facility will drive development of open-source solutions around IoT, edge
Global systems integrator World Wide Technology (WWT) is teaming with Dell Technologies on a new Center of Excellence (COE) that’s designed to help service providers like AT&T create open-source solutions that leverage 5G connectivity.
The Lowdown: The goal is to create replicable solution blueprints based on open-source technologies from multiple vendors that focus on such areas as edge computing, the Internet of Things (IoT) specific to particular industries, telco clouds, data analytics, and network-function virtualization (NFV), which all rely on fast and reliable connectivity.
The Details: The Center of Excellence, announced this month, will feature an infrastructure stack from Dell EMC and will be housed at WWT’s Advanced Technology Center (ATC), a facility with about $1 billion in hardware and software that’s used for testing and validating solutions.
Customers will get demonstrations and proofs-of-concept of the blueprints and be able to use the labs-as-a-service capabilities to validate the solutions before they’re deployed. Organizations can then integrate, stage, and deploy the solutions at scale via WWT’s integration facilities in St. Louis, Amsterdam, Singapore, or Mumbai.
The center also will work with the open-source community in building solution blueprints that use both open-source and traditional vendor offerings. One example is the COE hosting a bare metal contiguous integration lab for the Openstack Foundation’s Airship project for automating cloud provisioning.
The Impact: The ramp for 5G started last year and is expected to accelerate through 2020 and beyond, with more 5G-enabled phones hitting the market and the number of 5G networks expanding. The technology promises speeds up to 100 times faster than 4G or LTE and is a key technology for autonomous vehicles and other emerging trends. According to Statista, estimates put the number of 5G connections by 2021 anywhere between 20 million and 200 million, with spending on 5G infrastructure in the United States that year reaching $2.3 billion.
The Buzz: “Service providers are focused on creating new revenue streams and decreasing their time to achieve that revenue,” said Joe Wojtal, CTO of WWT’s Global Service Provider organization. “The WWT/Dell COE will enable service providers to more easily consume the underlying infrastructure required to deploy new services, allowing them to be more agile in creating those new services.”
“As businesses continue to work at unparalleled speeds, organizations must identify ways to simplify and streamline their existing and new networks,” said Kevin Shatzkamer, vice president of enterprise and service provider strategy and solutions at Dell EMC. “This center of excellence brings together the best of Dell Technologies and WWT to rapidly deploy solutions at scale and reduce the complexity for service providers, allowing them to focus on their core business.”
“The creation of this new Airship lab in collaboration with WWT, Dell, and Intel will go a long way toward helping the Airship community deliver its 2.0 release, which aims to fully embrace Cloud Native Computing Foundation projects and further simplify open infrastructure bare metal deployments,” said Ryan van Wyk, vice president of network cloud at AT&T. “Airship accelerates SDN [software-defined networking] deployments by removing complexity. Our Network Cloud team at AT&T intends to integrate the outputs from this and similar facilities into a release that will support cloud-native network functions.”
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