If you’re planning your organization’s RAN strategy, we have some great news. We also have some not-so-terrific news to report: there’s another side to the Open RAN story, and that is the potential to introduce massive operational complexity. Read on to discover how your business can avoid the challenges and potential pitfalls of RAN adoption.
By virtualizing and disaggregating monolithic, appliance-based RAN technologies, operators can lower costs and gain new deployment flexibility. But perhaps the most exciting part of this story is that they’ll be able to tap into disruptive new vendors and unleash RAN innovations that weren’t previously possible.
If you’re planning your organization’s RAN strategy, this is all great news. But there’s another side to the Open RAN story: the potential to introduce massive operational complexity. After all, shifting to an open, multi-vendor, cloud-native environment means working in ways that are radically different from today’s RAN models.
Fortunately, Hewlett Packard Enterprise can help you bridge the gap. With the new HPE RAN Automation solution, you can start automating multi-vendor RAN operations right now, and accelerate your journey to the O-RAN architectures of tomorrow.
Rethinking the RAN
In the last few years, the industry has been virtualizing and disaggregating telco networks. By breaking up monolithic network appliances and running network functions (NFs) as virtualized software on a cloud environment using standard servers, you can start treating your infrastructure like a flexible cloud service. And you can benefit from advantages cloud providers have enjoyed for years—increased agility, lower operating costs, more frequent software updates, and more.
Yet, while operators have made steady progress “cloudifying” core networks, the RAN has stayed pretty much the same, relying on closed, monolithic appliances managed with proprietary tools. Open RAN promises to disaggregate proprietary RAN appliances for the first time. With this new model, RAN infrastructure will run as cloud software in a layered and open architecture, using open interfaces and enabling multi-vendor interoperability. While we are still in the early days of this model, Open RAN is already making waves, with most operators either piloting it or planning to do so soon.
So, the future of radio networks looks bright.
For the present though, these trends—disaggregation, virtualization, open interfaces—make the RAN far more complex. Suddenly, you’re dealing with multi-vendor NFs running in dynamic open cloud environments, deployed in different architectures across thousands of distributed sites. And it’s not like yesterday’s RAN just disappears. In the near term at least, you’ll need to manage a mix of technologies, from 2G to the latest 5G components, both virtualized and traditional, even as you progress towards the full O-RAN vision.
There’s no way to deploy and configure all those distributed RAN elements easily or efficiently at scale, much less manage and maintain them, using traditional tools. Only artificial intelligence (AI)-driven management can tame that kind of complexity. Bottom line: automation is no longer aspirational. If you’re going to tap into the benefits of an open, virtualized RAN, it’s now table stakes. That’s where HPE comes in.
Introducing HPE RAN Automation
The latest addition to our next-generation telco portfolio is HPE RAN Automation. The solution brings pre-integrated RAN edge infrastructure management and automation, accelerating deployment of multi-vendor virtual RAN (vRAN) components across thousands of sites. It also offers multi-generational RF deployment configuration and AI-driven assurance to radically simplify management of both traditional and new Open RAN technologies – all from a common platform.
HPE RAN Automation provides vendor-agnostic, zero-touch operations across the entire radio access stack, from infrastructure to RAN workloads and RF configuration. It draws on our leadership in operations support systems (OSS), along with AI and Machine Learning (ML) technologies, to manage the full lifecycle of virtualized, disaggregated RAN components. That includes intent-based orchestration and configuration of virtual Distributed Unit and Centralized Unit (vDU/vCU) components to enable new disaggregated RAN architectures. HPE RAN automation also automates RF deployment and configuration, and provides end-to-end observability and assurance for all layers of the disaggregated RAN.
Equally important, you can consume this pre-integrated, cloud-native solution as a service, fully operated by HPE, on a public or private cloud. This means you can start simplifying and automating the deployment and ongoing management of your distributed RAN, without a huge upfront capital investment. And you can avoid an expensive and time-consuming system integration effort, as well as the need to maintain and support a new software stack.
O-RAN vision for the industry
A commitment to open standards
If you’re going to make the most of a multi-vendor Open RAN, you can’t build your operations with closed, proprietary tools. That’s why we designed HPE RAN Automation to be open and vendor-agnostic from day one, and to align with open standards and open-source frameworks that include:
- RAN management. HPE RAN Automation follows the principles of the O-RAN Alliance’s Service Management and Orchestration (SMO) architecture, which provides the capability to provision, monitor, and operate all layers of the disaggregated RAN.
- Multi-vendor RAN lifecycle management. The solution provides vendor-agnostic capabilities to onboard European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI)-compliant RAN vDU/vCU components, and manage radio configuration. From an Infrastructure management perspective, HPE RAN Automation takes advantage of the Open Distributed Infrastructure Management (ODIM) framework and uses the Distributed Management Task Force’s (DMTF) Redfish as a universal open interface to manage both HPE and third-party infrastructure.
- Software updates. HPE RAN Automation uses Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines to enable constant updates and ensure that your management and automation platform aligns with the latest O-RAN standards and the latest software from our RAN partners.
Evolving your network
O-RAN offers a compelling vision for what you’ll be able to do with tomorrow’s RAN. But the reality is, RAN vendors and the broader ecosystem are still in the early stages of building support for fully open architectures. That’s why we designed HPE RAN Automation to deliver immediate, concrete benefits in deploying and managing your virtualized RAN infrastructure today – with a clear path to the future.
You can use our AI-enabled, modular automation solution to start accelerating RAN operations such as multi-vendor infrastructure management, vDU/vCU instantiation and management, and Day 1/Day2 RF configuration. It’s ready to leverage today, in a platform that’s pre-integrated and validated with RAN partners. In the future, as O-RAN gains wider industry adoption, you’ll be able to transition to full O-RAN with relatively minor software updates, instead of needing a major overhaul to implement it.
Looking even farther ahead? We see multi-vendor RAN automation solutions evolving to function . We envision a future where you’ll be able to browse an “app store” of RAN optimization applications (rApps), and quickly deploy and fully manage rApps—from HPE, our RAN partners, even rApps you develop yourself—all within an open environment.
Get started
Ready to shortcut your deployment timelines, and radically simplify the management of both new and traditional multi-vendor RAN components—all using open standards? HPE RAN Automation is ready for demos and early trials right now.
To learn more, visit our webpage @ https://www.hpe.com/telco/openran.
Throughout his career, Capperi has worked in a variety of international organizations and has gained practical, working knowledge of different cultural environments. His hands-on experience has enabled him to better understand unique local market requirements, in addition to being well-versed in global IT and Telco trends.
Stefano has led both business units and practices that address market trends in the areas of 5G, MEC/EDGE, SDN/NFV, artificial intelligence and machine learning, data analytics, E2E automation, orchestration, service assurance, digital video, and Industry 4.0 IoT/M2M.
Connect with Stefano on LinkedIn.
Telco Industry Marketing
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
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