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Viavi | November 25, 2022
Viavi Solutions Inc.today announced that it has signed a partnership agreement with VMware to drive standardized frameworks and metrics for RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) testing. This testbed as a service will enable mobile operators to introduce programmability to the RAN and help accelerate the adoption of Open RAN.
The RIC is a cloud-native central component of an open and virtualized RAN network, enabling the optimization of RAN resources through analytic processing and adaptation recommendations. The RIC takes advantage of native and third-party xApps and rApps – microservice-based applications operating in near-real time (near-RT) and non-real-time (non-RT), respectively – to enable operators to automate and optimize RAN operations at scale to reduce the operator's total cost of ownership, and to introduce innovative new services.
VMware is focused on attracting and collaborating with a vibrant ecosystem of partners to help its operator customers adopt Open RAN with complete confidence. VIAVI has the most comprehensive portfolio of Open RAN test solutions in the industry and plays a leading role in defining test processes in the O-RAN ALLIANCE and Telecom Infra Project (TIP).
The two companies will work together to demonstrate compliance with RIC-related requirements, assisting CSPs in validating the solution in the lab and scaling the solution to production. The industry-leading VIAVI TeraVM RIC Test and the VMware RIC will form a joint testbed as a service for testing, profiling, and validating third-party xApps and rApps. In addition to the framework, the two companies will work together to drive industry consensus around testing methodology and performance metrics. By having pre-built test cases and a standardized test method for the RIC and xApp/rApp, operators can reduce the time it takes to validate the solution in their lab, meaning they can move to a production environment faster.
"Open RAN, by definition, depends on strong collaboration to drive innovation, and that's a perfect way to think about this partnership between leaders in their respective fields, The RIC represents a huge opportunity to the industry: Applying AI/ML techniques allows operators to simplify the management of complex 5G configurations and dynamically optimize the network to cater for new use cases, energy efficiency, and changing traffic patterns."
Ian Langley, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Wireless Business, VIAVI
"We're excited to work with VIAVI on helping move the industry forward to accelerate the adoption of Open RAN," said Lakshmi Mandyam, vice president, Service Provider Product Management and Partner Ecosystem, VMware. "Our companies share a vision of what it will take to address the challenges hindering adoption by simplifying the path for CSPs to test, profile, and certify third-party xApps and rApps through a common framework. VIAVI's leadership in Open RAN testing and VMware's leadership in RIC make this an ideal collaboration."
About VIAVI
VIAVI (NASDAQ: VIAV) is a global provider of network test, monitoring and assurance solutions for communications service providers, hyperscalers, equipment manufacturers, enterprises, government and avionics. VIAVI is also a leader in light management technologies for 3D sensing, anti-counterfeiting, consumer electronics, industrial, automotive, government and aerospace applications. Together with our customers and partners we are United in Possibility, finding innovative ways to solve real-world problems.
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VIRTUAL SERVER INFRASTRUCTURE
Red Hat | October 28, 2022
Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today introduced Red Hat Device Edge, a solution for flexibly deploying traditional or containerized workloads on small devices such as robots, IoT gateways, points of sale, public transport and more. Red Hat Device Edge delivers an enterprise-ready and supported distribution of the Red Hat-led open source community project MicroShift, a lightweight Kubernetes orchestration solution built from the edge capabilities of Red Hat OpenShift, along with an edge-optimized operating system built from Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This latest product in the Red Hat edge portfolio aims to provide a future-proof platform that allows organizations’ architecture to evolve as their workload strategy changes.
As more and more companies deploy edge computing across a broader range of use cases, many new questions, operational needs and business challenges are poised to arise. In industries like automotive, manufacturing and more, organizations are up against different environmental, security and operational challenges that require an ability to work with small form-factor edge devices in these resource constrained environments. Ultimately, different devices have different requirements in terms of computing power, software compatibility and security footprint.
With Red Hat Device Edge, organizations can have the flexibility to deploy containers at the edge in a small footprint, reducing compute requirements by up to 50% in comparison to traditional Kubernetes edge configurations. It also helps to address many of the emerging questions around large-scale edge computing at the device edge by incorporating:
Kubernetes built for edge deployments, enabling IT teams to use familiar Kubernetes features in a new, smaller, lighter-weight footprint offered by MicroShift. This lowers the barrier of entry for teams building cloud-native applications for edge computing environments and enables them to use existing Kubernetes skills to achieve greater consistency of operations across the entirety of the hybrid cloud, from the datacenter to public clouds to the edge.
An edge-optimized Linux OS built from the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform in Red Hat Enterprise Linux and tailored for small edge devices with intelligent updates that use minimum bandwidth. This helps organizations tackle the challenges of intermittent connectivity while mitigating the impact on edge innovation.
Capabilities for centrally scaling and monitoring edge device fleets with Red Hat Smart Management. IT teams can use zero-touch provisioning, system health visibility and updates with automatic rollbacks to maintain a stronger edge management and application security posture.
Red Hat Device Edge for far-flung, resource constrained use cases across different industries
Red Hat Device Edge was created to help Red Hat customers and partners tackle their most challenging edge environments. For example, Lockheed Martin has been collaborating with Red Hat in the MicroShift project community and is also working to deploy Red Hat Device Edge to modernize and standardize its application delivery and AI workloads in extreme conditions including wildland fire management, contested military environments and space. Additionally, ABB is planning to use Red Hat Device Edge for ABB Ability™ Edgenius™ on resource constrained devices. Edgenius is a comprehensive edge platform for industrial software applications.
Red Hat Device Edge will be aimed at organizations who require small factor edge devices with support for bare metal, virtualized or containerized applications, regardless of industry. Additional use cases include but are not limited to:
Miniature, connected nodes on public transportation where edge devices are often in motion but still need faster processing via AI/ML to analyze data locally in real time (i.e. railways, mining, cars, drones).
Resilient resource nodes at challenging locations like weather monitoring stations where, in spite of the harsh, tough-to-support environments, an edge device will still be capable of taking care of itself with the ability to perform automated software rollbacks, maintain a stronger security posture and better enforce sensitive data controls.
Emerging edge constrained scenarios where thousands of edge devices may be running applications in locations that make weight, temperature and connectivity all major concerns.
Red Hat Device Edge meets organizations wherever they are today in their edge computing journey, as it will run a wide variety of workloads using Podman for edge container management or MicroShift for a Kubernetes API. Customers will even be able to use legacy windows applications within a virtual machine.
Availability
Red Hat Device Edge is planned as a developer preview early next year, and expected to be generally available with full support later in 2023.
Supporting Quotes
Francis Chow, vice president and general manager, In-Vehicle Operating System and Edge, Red Hat
“Innovation at the edge has introduced new benefits and use cases for organizations across all industries - but it has also created new challenges. Working with our customers and partners, Red Hat began a journey to develop a new technology offering - designed specifically for the edge - extending our hybrid cloud solution so that our ecosystem will be able to take advantage of intelligence paired with trusted open source technology to tackle their smallest footprint remote edge use cases. Tested in the community, now produced by Red Hat, Red Hat Device Edge is a major next step in harnessing the full range of benefits promised by edge computing.”
Justin Taylor, vice president of Artificial Intelligence, Lockheed Martin
“Red Hat Device Edge will enable Lockheed Martin to revolutionize artificial intelligence processing for our DOD customers’ most challenging missions. The ability for small military platforms to handle large AI workloads will increase their capacity in the field, ensuring our military can stay ahead of evolving threats. Lockheed Martin is a long-time customer and collaborator to Red Hat and working on Red Hat Device Edge together is a critical next step in this strategic relationship.”
Bernhard Eschermann, chief technology officer, ABB Process Automation
“ABB is excited to continue working with Red Hat to streamline the transition from automated to autonomous operations for the manufacturing industry. With Red Hat Device Edge, ABB will be able to connect cloud and control environments to improve asset efficiency and operations by aggregating and analyzing data on devices with more limited resources. With this continued collaboration, ABB’s ecosystem will experience the benefit of open source solutions driven by innovative market leaders now and in the future. ”
About Red Hat, Inc.
Red Hat is the world’s leading provider of enterprise open source software solutions, using a community-powered approach to deliver reliable and high-performing Linux, hybrid cloud, container, and Kubernetes technologies. Red Hat helps customers integrate new and existing IT applications, develop cloud-native applications, standardize on our industry-leading operating system, and automate, secure, and manage complex environments. Award-winning support, training, and consulting services make Red Hat a trusted adviser to the Fortune 500. As a strategic partner to cloud providers, system integrators, application vendors, customers, and open source communities, Red Hat can help organizations prepare for the digital future.
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VIRTUAL DESKTOP TOOLS
Verge.io | September 14, 2022
Verge.io, the company with a simpler way to virtualize data centers, and Dallas Digital Services, an IT solutions provider for enterprises and government agencies, today announced an agreement to offer Verge.io’s virtual cloud software stack as a simple, cost-effective alternative to build, deploy and manage virtual data centers.
With Verge-OS software, Dallas Digital enables virtualized data centers for its clients with greater savings and efficiencies. Verge-OS abstracts compute, network, and storage from commodity servers and creates pools of raw resources that are simple to run and manage, creating feature-rich infrastructures for environments and workloads like clustered HPC, ultra-converged and hyperconverged data centers, DevOps and Test/Dev, compliant medical and healthcare, remote and edge compute including VDI, and multi-tenant private clouds.
“Legacy virtualization platforms require many different SKUs, with complex pricing schemes and significant API integration to build out a virtualized data center, especially at scale,” said Howie Evans Vice President Dallas Digital. “We are pleased to be able to offer Verge-OS as a way to deliver a virtual data center experience but in a secure, hardware-efficient system that can scale compute, memory, and storage resources as needed.”
“Recent M&A activity is causing enterprises to look for alternatives to legacy systems, and partnerships with solution providers like Dallas Digital are an ideal way to bring these customers a modernized virtualization platform for the way organizations work today, Verge-OS is not only simpler to configure and run, it’s simpler to buy, and simpler for Dallas Digital to support.”
Yan Ness, CEO at Verge.io
Verge-OS is an ultra-thin software—less than 300,000 lines of code—that is easy to install and scale on low-cost commodity hardware and self-manages based on AI/ML. A single license replaces separate hypervisor, networking, storage, data protection, and management tools to simplify operations and downsize complex technology stacks.
Secure virtual data centers based on Verge-OS include all enterprise data services like global deduplication, disaster recovery, continuous data protection, snapshots, long-distance synch, and auto-failover. They are ideal for creating honeypots, sandboxes, cyber ranges, air-gapped computing, and secure compliance enclaves to meet regulations such as HIPAA, CUI, SOX, NIST, and PCI. Nested multi-tenancy gives service providers, departmental enterprises, and campuses the ability to assign resources and services to groups and sub-groups.
About Dallas Digital Services
Founded in 1996, Dallas Digital Services began as an on-site service provider for enterprise companies and has developed into a highly recognized solution provider for mission critical and high availability solutions. It is a relationship-driven IT solutions provider, offering best-of-breed technology and services for enterprise organizations as well as public-sector entities. It offers strategic services, technical expertise, and sales support to enable clients to maximize the value of their data center investments. Based on each customer's unique objectives and IT environment, Dallas Digital can assess, architect, implement, and manage solutions that improve current technology performance.
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SERVER VIRTUALIZATION
Lightbits | November 21, 2022
Lightbits, the first software-defined and architected for NVMe® over TCP (NVMe®/TCP) data platform for any cloud, today announced that x-cellent technologies, a German-based technology consultancy, will integrate their high-performance, persistent storage running on Intel® high-performance technologies into their metalstack.cloud infrastructure. metalstack.cloud is a new cloud service offering that was initiated by x-cellent technologies on base of Open-Source solutions like Gardener as an alternative to public cloud solutions. metalstack.cloud targets customers and developers who require a secure tech platform to run Kubernetes as a Service for their applications from different industries and market domains, such as manufacturing companies, software companies, consulting companies, and startups. The service is produced and operated in Germany.
metalstack.cloud is a set of microservices that implements Kubernetes (K8s) as a service on bare metal and enables elastic cloud infrastructure. It leverages K8s clusters so that end users can easily, securely, and cost-effectively launch their apps on the platform without having to worry about server hardware, networking, and storage management. The architecture is based on their open-source software, metal-stack.io, which was developed for the highly regulated financial sector and is being used successfully by CSPs, including Finanz Informatik Technologie Service (FI-TS), which is also the developer of metal-stack.io and a Lightbits customer. By using metalstack.cloud end users have access to a full K8s stack to develop and run their applications on and can be up and running within 15 minutes.
“We have found Lightbits to be a perfect match for K8s workloads, a much simpler, and higher performing alternative to Ceph and other enterprise storage solutions, We have integrated Lightbits software with Intel high-performance hardware into our state-of-the-art Platform as a Service (PaaS), metalstack.cloud, because it allows us to manage the entire infrastructure of the data center with a lot of flexibility and in a highly available way.”
Stefan Majer, Chief Technology Officer at x-cellent technologies GmbH
The combined solution of Lightbits software with Intel high-performance technologies delivers an unmatched combination of performance, resiliency, and cost-efficiency for any cloud. Together, the companies are helping customers address their complex data center needs enabling CSPs, like metalstack.cloud, to deliver fast, resilient, and secure services to their clients. The solution can be used as a high-performance data platform for any orchestration environment, such as OpenStack, or to run container-based applications in a Kubernetes environment as well as virtualized applications in a VMware vSphere environment.
“We are proud that x-cellent technologies have chosen Lightbits for their cloud platforms. It’s a good match, as their business philosophy closely aligns with our own—build state-of-the-art cloud data platforms that are simple to consume and deliver an unbeatable price-to-performance ratio at scale,” said Eran Kirzner, CEO at Lightbits Labs. “Our solutions help rid customers of the costly dependencies to hyperscalers, and vendor lock-in, but without compromising high-performance, security, scalability, and ease of use.”
metalstack.cloud is in beta release, with general availability in 2023.
About Lightbits Labs
Lightbits Labs® (Lightbits), is on a mission to make high-performance block storage simple, scalable, and cost-efficient for any cloud. Lightbits offers a Cloud Data Platform that delivers efficiency, simplicity, and agility for modern data centers. Inventors of the NVMe® over TCP (NVMe/TCP) protocol, Lightbits is leading the digital data center transformation by making software-defined storage that is easy to deploy at scale and delivers performance equivalent to local flash to accelerate cloud-native applications in bare metal, virtual, or containerized environments.
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