Dell expands focus on telecom space with new deployment software | ZDNet

Dell Technology has announced the introduction of its Bare Metal Orchestrator, which is software it boasts will help telecoms solve the complexities associated with deploying and managing servers across various geographic locations.

As the first software to be released from Project Metalweaver, which was announced in June, Dell said the Bare Metal Orchestrator will offer communication service providers (CSPs) the tools to automatically discover, deploy, and manage their servers.

“With Bare Metal Orchestrator, cloud communication service providers are going to be able to keep costs in control, while they build out their edge,” Dell Technologies edge and telecom VP Aaron Chaisson told media.

“As an example, if you look at all of the hyperscale clouds in the world, the total number of points of presence is only about 600. In the telecom space, there’s over 7 billion points of presence, globally,” he added.

“Managing that type of scale is a major challenge for the telecom providers, so they need to solve this ability to address day-to-day virtual network tasks across their entire core edge and RAN environment at scale, across a highly distributed and geographical set of locations.”

Chaisson claimed the software could save CSPs “up to 57% in operational costs”.

To be globally available from November, the first release will support VMware, with future releases to also include RedHat and Wind River.

Dell added it is expanding its open partner ecosystem by making its reference architecture, initially available for VMware and Red Hat, now available for Wind River Studio. The company is also introducing from early 2022 validated solution for Mavenir Open vRAN and VMware Telco Cloud Platform to accelerate the shift to ORAN technologies.  

The tech giant first flagged its foray into the telecom space during Dell World in May, before it announced a slew of hardware and software to build out its cloud-native telecom ecosystem.

At the time, Dell’s Telecom Systems Business senior VP and general manager said the “5G era is really the ‘enterprise G’.”

“It’s the era in which the next set of those kinds of transformational services are going to take place throughout the economy,” he said.

“Three things have to happen in order to do that. First, they (telecom companies) need to be able to build and monetize edge computing. Second, they need to modernize network architectures — the legacy network isn’t as agile as it needs to be. It isn’t software-defined — it’s fundamentally not cloud-native. That really gets to the last piece, which is cloud-native operations need to become the principal mechanism by which a communication service provider operates,” Hoffman continued.

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