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Dell, Orange 5G Partnership Targets Edge and IoT Services
Dell Technologies and mobile service provider Orange recently announced a partnership to deal with new challenges coming with the advent of 5G wireless.
"5G will require a new breed of platforms supporting a rich catalogue of near real-time edge computing and IoT services," Dell Technologies said in a recent news release announcing the partnership.
5G is expected by industry pundits to especially have a huge impact on IoT implementations, as detailed in articles such as "What 5G Means for the Internet of Things" (IoT Innovation) and "5G To Become the Catalyst for Innovation in IoT (Network World).
Having just recently debuted, 5G provides next-gen mobile Internet connectivity at higher speeds, which will result in new distributed cloud architectures, new use cases and new services. The companies are teaming up to explore how to deal with all of that.
Dell said the companies "will collaborate on meeting demands for new distributed architectures for 5G that combine the best of cloud and mobility. These distributed architectures will provide a common hardware foundation of automated, agnostic software-defined infrastructure, extending from on-premise to the radio to the core, to accelerate innovation and service delivery."
Dell Technologies and Orange, which claims some 264 million customers worldwide, say they will combine their telecommunications expertise to test and develop 5G use cases and business models and team up for "multi-access edge computing and supporting technologies for software-defined mobility with distributed, multi-cloud and edge architectures."
Specifically, the Dell Technologies/Orange pact will entail an effort to define and develop:
- Edge technology use cases, business models and proof of concepts
- Open source consortia and partnerships for the edge ecosystem
- Definition and validation of infrastructure accelerators, such as FPGAs, GPUs, and SmartNICs, for edge workloads, including Cloud/Virtual RAN (CRAN/vRAN), MEC, and real-time, interactive, latency-sensitive applications
- AI/ML-enabled software to support remote automation of a multi-technology, heterogeneous edge built on virtual machines, containers, and bare metal workloads
- Edge infrastructure platforms supporting Telco environmental, space, operational and automation requirements.
"We're working closely with Orange to combine our joint Telco best practices with decades of data center transformation experience to help service providers re-tool their operations to quickly and profitably roll out new 5G services," said Tom Burns, senior vice president, Dell EMC Networking & Solutions. "For 5G and Telco cloud services, service providers are turning to IT-proven technologies such as IaaS, virtualization, and standardized infrastructure to deliver the required agility, security and control."
About the Author
David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.