The new high-level technology partnership is intended to help to support service opportunities in a cloud-oriented 5G world. The two companies intend to take the best practices from the telecommunications industry (which AT&T will provide) with detailed data center transformation experience (which is a specialism of Dell’s) to help service providers quickly roll out new breeds of experiential edge computing and 5G services.
Edge computing relates to running fewer processes in the cloud and moving the processes to local places, such as on a user’s computer, an IoT device, or an edge server. This is useful for where fast decisions are required, such as with autonomous car technology or where latency-sensitive processing of information is needed, as with some voice assistants.
Combining these respective expertise, the new collaboration will lead to an alignment on an overall vision of network disaggregation and accelerate the deployment of open infrastructure. This will include AT&T’s Network Cloud utilizing Airship, which is a collection of loosely coupled, but interoperable, open source tools that function to automate cloud provisioning and life-cycle management utilizing containers as the unit of software delivery. Airship aims to automate the provisioning telecom cloud infrastructure for 5G.
The development also aims to accelerate Airship toward a 2.0 release, which will deliver streamlined aggregator open technologies for deploying and managing Kubernetes environments and cloud software. Kubernete is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. There will also be development of additional open source efforts like Metal3-io and OpenStack Ironic.
This necessary because 5G requires considerable transformation, such as new, distributed architectures that use software-defined, disaggregated and open infrastructure to automate the delivery and management of mobile services. Dell indicate that 5G is not a simple transition from 4G, it requires a considerable technological overhaul for businesses.
