In order to simplify 5G rollout, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) have today announced the Open Distributed Infrastructure Management initiative, which eliminates multi-vendor hardware complexity, simplifying end-to-end automation and accelerating technology evolution.
The Open Distributed Infrastructure Management initiative
The Open Distributed Infrastructure Management initiative is a new open source program that will simplify the management of large-scale geographically distributed physical infrastructure deployments.
In addition, HPE will introduce an enterprise offering, the HPE Open Distributed Infrastructure Management Resource Aggregator that is aligned with the initiative.
The Open Distributed Infrastructure Management will help resolve the complexity that telcos face in rolling out 5G networks across thousands of sites equipped with IT infrastructure from multiple vendors and different generations of technology. This new initiative will catalyse 5G and accelerate industry alignment through open source innovation.
Working with partners, HPE’s 5G portfolio promises to unleash the potential of 5G at the network core, at the edge and in the enterprise.
“This initiative proposes new DMTF Redfish® extensions that will provide a path forward for the creation of powerful new software-defined data centre paradigms that enable end-to-end network automation,” said Ashish Nadkarni, GVP, IDC.
“This open standards-based initiative offers organisations a way to converge multivendor hardware resources under a unified infrastructure management solution, promising to accelerate both 5G rollout and innovation across the industry.”
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The industry partners
This initiative is being launched in collaboration with Intel and with support from key industry leaders including AMI, Apstra, Red Hat, Tech Mahindra and World Wide Technology.
HPE alongside Intel plans to initiate an open source project under the Linux Foundation to further develop the initiative in conjunction with ecosystem partners to enable end-to-end automated management of networks.
“Infrastructure management and orchestration can benefit from common open source building blocks including APIs and data models,” said Dan Rodriguez, Corporate VP and GM of Intel’s Network Platforms Group.
“The ODIM initiative builds upon the work we have done with HPE on top of Redfish and will ultimately help Communications Service Providers and Enterprises discover and unleash the full potential of the underlying technologies in their distributed deployments.”
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5G rollout: a huge shift
The impending 5G rollout represents a huge shift in the way mobile networks are built.
Previous generation networks, like 4G and 3G, were largely built on proprietary systems, but 5G standards have been designed to utilise open software platforms operating on commercial off-the-shelf servers.
The trend towards open distributed technologies, like virtualised radio access networks (vRAN), multi-access edge computing (MEC) and cloud-native network functions will require the deployment of industry standard compute, storage and networking infrastructure from multiple vendors across potentially thousands of geographically distributed locations.
Today, most data centre physical infrastructure management solutions do not scale geographically or support multi-vendor deployments, resulting in operational inefficiencies and inhibiting technology innovation.
The Open Distributed Infrastructure Management initiative aims to simplify this network management and drive significant operational and financial benefits. It will support large scale, geographically distributed networks and facilitates interaction between disparate multi-vendor infrastructure resources.
“5G and edge computing industry initiatives will require large-scale and geographically distributed multivendor infrastructure deployments that can only be cost effectively realised with infrastructure-as-code automation,” said Claus Pedersen, VP, Telco Infrastructure Solutions at HPE.
“The Open Distributed Infrastructure Management initiative tackles network scalability challenges and the costs associated with vendor lock-in by enabling multivendor infrastructure deployments, the centralised deployment of standards-based fault and configuration management, and the aggregation of resource-specific status information.”
A standard-based approach
As a founding member of the DMTF Redfish® open source initiative, HPE is well placed to provide leadership in this space.
A recent AvidThink report concluded that there is a need for a standards-based approach to large scale distributed physical infrastructure management. This applies to telco networks, but is also very relevant across many other verticals, including large enterprises with geographically distributed data centres.
