As network business and digital services come together and telcos expand revenue opportunities through IoT adoption, what challenges exist not only in IoT adoption, but also to develop, deploy and monetize new connected services? At TIA's CTO Council Meeting in Austin, TX, TIA NOW covered these issues with industry leaders including Amit Tiwari, VP of Strategic Alliances and Systems Engineering at Affirmed Networks; Brent Hodges, IoT Planning and Product Strategy at Dell EMC; Godfrey Chua, Principal Analyst at Machina Research and Sameh Yamany, CTO at Viavi Solutions.

Jeff Baher, Senior Director of Service Provider Solutions at Dell EMC, talks to TIA NOW about the shift in the service provider space as compute in the core moves to the edge of the network.

Tord Nilsson, Director of Global Marketing at Dell EMC, tells TIA NOW where we are on the journey towards network function virtualization, and what the effect is of merging EMC and Dell with respect to telecom. 

Here’s an idea. Why not get rid of ‘virtualization’ when we’re talking about next generation telco networks?  Not the technique, you understand, just the word.

Why? Because there are signs that its continued use is beginning to constrain our thinking. After all, the industry doesn’t want to engineer ‘virtual’ versions of what has already been committed to hardware. It wants new stuff, agile stuff. It wants a fresh start.

Four years ago the original NFV white paper introduced the revolutionary and liberating concept of Network Functions Virtualization (NFV). The idea was to emulate the clear advantages the IT industry was enjoying, having virtualized applications in the data centre and then having utilised open source software and commodity server hardware to build massive ‘web scale’ clouds which enabled them to run the vast applications (Google, Facebook, AWS) which today dominate the Internet.  

It was not just the scale economics which attracted envious looks from telcos, but the use of open source software to provide an agile, open environment where software development and operations (Devops) worked hand-in-hand on a never-ending cycle of innovation and service improvement.

If telecoms could have this sort of capability, it was thought, it could see off the challenge from the dreaded ‘OTT’ players eating the telcos’ lunch.

Kevin Shatzkamer, VP of Service Provider Solutions and Strategy at Dell EMC speaks with TIA NOW’s Abe Nejad about his new role, which includes areas like strategy and architectural evolution at the intersection points of network technologies, virtual platforms and software programmability.

As new business models around NFV increase, operators are no longer managing a handful of innovations - but now managing dozens of technologies that support NFV. In comes the independent systems integrator, to marry these innovations with operators to customize and create a robust NFV solution. At Mobile World Congress 2017, TIA NOW hosted a panel discussion focused on relieving the complexity of NFV. On the panel are Kevin Shatzkamer, VP, Service Provider Solutions and Strategy at Dell EMC and Amol Phadke, Managing Director, Global Network Virtualization and Transformation at Accenture. 

• Here’s why and how telcos could join together and play the responsibility card on Internet of Things with the proposition that the telco IoT business is not just about mining data: it’s about being the customer’s data custodian and, if instructed, its broker.

• Dell’s Women Entrepreneur Cities Index - rating cities’ ability to attract and foster growth of women-owned firms
• New York City, the San Francisco Bay Area, London, Boston and Stockholm are the top-five
• Dell provides a diagnostic tool to advise entrepreneurs and policy-makers on how to improve conditions

• BT and Dell EMC develop a 'Proof of Concept' for disaggregated switching
• Trial to use the sort of ‘open’ network switches currently used in data centres
• BT to evaluate performance of  the disaggregated switch and software combination against traditional integrated switching hardware

• VMware Integrated OpenStack-Carrier Edition claims:
• Enhanced VNF Performance along with
• Dynamic Scaling, Multi-Tenancy, and Cloud Resource Reservation

• This blog is the fruit of a discussion between Ian Scales, Managing Editor, TelecomTV and Tord Nilsson, Director of Global Marketing at Dell EMC

As David Bowie almost sang, “It’s been five years, my brain hurts a lot,” a sentiment many participants in the NFV ISG can relate to. But looking back they also feel that the ‘journey’ has been successful - they are happy with the NFV foundations and appreciate all the learnings they’ve picked up on the way. There is now no question that the VNFs can work, said one participant, now we’re concerned that they can all work together.

Featuring: 

As David Bowie almost sang, “It’s been five years, my brain hurts a lot,” a sentiment many participants in the NFV ISG can relate to. But looking back they also feel that the ‘journey’ has been successful - they are happy with the NFV foundations and appreciate all the learnings they’ve picked up on the way. There is now no question that the VNFs can work, said one participant, now we’re concerned that they can all work together.

Featuring: 

Why is the network edge such an important issue for the telecoms industry right now, and perhaps even more critically, where exactly is the “network edge” and how do we define it? As CSPs re-architect their networks and start investigating edge-based business models, what are the types of services and applications that the industry expects to see at the edge, and what are the associated architectural challenges of the network edge?

Featuring:
Kevin Shatzkamer, VP Service Provider Strategy, Architecture & Solutions, Dell EMC
Caroline Chan, VP Data Centre Group, 5G Infrastructure Division, Intel

Filmed at: Mobile World Congress, 2018, Barcelona, Spain

The concept of “Zero Touch” is becoming increasingly important, as the industry develops its virtualised network offerings to support 5G deployments. But what are the requirements needed by telcos to support the end-to-end zero touch network and service management of a multi-vendor environment? How do we ensure end- to-end network programmability for service creation and full automation of life-cycle processes? Automation is an essential component of future networks, especially given the importance of 5G network slicing and the dynamic provisioning of numerous virtualised networks for industry use cases. Getting all this working is a major challenge.
How does this fit with the equally topical subject at MWC this year of Network Slicing? And what is the advice for those service providers who are now starting to seriously explore Zero Touch within 5G architectures? The panel looks at the new options available to operators as we move towards dynamic, automated and agile 5G networks and services, as will debate the challenges still faced.

Featuring:

Gabriele Di Piazza, VP Solutions Telco/NFV, VMware
Chandresh Ruparel, Director, Ecosystem Strategy & Enablement, Network Platforms Group, Intel 
Francisco Javier Ramon Salguero, Head of Network Virtualisation Initiative, GCTO, 
Telefonica
Kevin Shatzkamer, VP Service Provider Strategy, Architecture & Solutions, Dell EMC

Filmed at:  Mobile World Congress, 2018, Barcelona, Spain

Kevin and Steve talk through the thinking behind Dell EMC’s launch of its Virtual Edge Platform, the 4600, which is optimized to host VNFs (Virtual Network Functions) and, Dell EMC claims, is ideal for SD-WAN applications.  Kevin also explains the company’s Service Provider Ready nodes. While Dell EMC is primarily a vendor of network infrastructure, with the current transition to virtualization it also sees its role as an integration-savvy advisor to its telco customers on how to choose and integrate an increasingly complex and diverse set of applications.   

Featuring:
Kevin Shatzkamer, VP of Service Provider Strategy, Architecture & Solutions at Dell EMC
Steve Woo, Co-founder of VeloCloud

Filmed at: Mobile World Congress 2018

• Aim to accelerate adoption of disaggregated networking
• Offers lower costs, increased choice and greater reliability
• Dell EMC to resell Metaswitch CNP solution
• Will integrate with EMC OS10 Open Edition

New platform family and software bundles enhance SD-WAN to speed Digital Transformation and expand opportunities for service providers, enterprises

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Launches Virtual Edge Platform family, future-ready and purpose-built universal Customer Premise Equipment for virtual networking and software-defined environments

• First-to-market with SD-WAN solution using the newly-released Intel® Xeon® D-2100 processor

• Validated, tested solutions with Silver Peak, VeloCloud and Versa software simplify and accelerate deployments

HOPKINTON, MASS., MARCH 21, 2018 - Dell EMC introduces its Virtual Edge Platform (VEP) family, the first-to-market software-defined wide area network solution (SD-WAN) with the new Intel® Xeon® D-2100 processor, to help speed digital transformation by connecting the enterprise edge to the cloud via universal Customer Premise Equipment (uCPE). The new virtualized solutions will enhance or displace expensive fixed-function access hardware.

As a leading use case, the Dell EMC VEP provides next-generation access to the network via SD-WAN. By enhancing WAN operations and economics, service providers and enterprise customers can drive growth, strengthen competitive differentiation and improve the end-user experience.

“There is a real need among service providers and enterprises to update network operations to address distributed and cloud-based applications and capitalize on changing economics enabled by cloud models,” said Tom Burns, senior vice president, Networking & Service Provider Solutions. “By infusing Open Networking into access networks to the cloud with the Virtual Edge Platform family, Dell EMC can help customers modernize infrastructure and transform operations while automating service delivery and processes.”

To control costs, reduce complexity and enable scalability for growth, many service providers and enterprises are modernizing infrastructure, not only in the data center, but out to the network edge, including branch offices. Using software-defined architecture, Open Networking and virtualization to improve network access, organizations can accelerate their digital transformation goals to take advantage of new market opportunities more quickly, flexibly and efficiently.

Dell EMC VEP4600 - Bringing Open Networking to the enterprise edge

Built with advanced intelligence for network virtualization and software-defined architecture, the Dell EMC VEP4600 provides an open Intel® architecture-based platform to support multiple simultaneous virtual network functions (VNF). Numerous proprietary physical devices can be consolidated into this single uCPE while maintaining the high performance levels needed to host many. The modular design includes room to grow with front panel expandability so the platform can be easily upgraded or serviced in the field as needed.

The VEP 4600 is powered by the new Intel Xeon D-2100 product family, Intel® QuickAssist Technology (Intel® QAT), and Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK). These features help optimize compute resources and provide efficiency for growing security workloads.

The Intel Xeon D-2100 product family’s performance, power and form factor have been tuned for higher performance-per-watt for SD-WAN and uCPE. It delivers more than 1.5x faster CPU performance1, up to 2x improvement in packet processing, 2x memory bandwidth and up to 4x memory capacity2. These processors enable complex packet processing and other scale-out workloads with responsiveness and low latency.

The cost- and power-efficient Dell EMC VEP4600 expands upon Dell EMC’s Open Networking initiative that offers customers choice and the ability to protect their investment. The Dell EMC VEP platform provides the performance, programmability and time-to-delivery to rapidly adapt new service requirements such as routing, firewalling and deep-packet inspection. These additional VNFs can be added to the VEP by customers and/or Dell EMC in the future if needed.

For large operators and enterprises with multiple locations, Dell EMC can help smooth procurement, deployment and support through its global manufacturing scale, logistics and services with a single point of contact and accountability.

Accelerating SD-WAN adoption with validated solutions

To help service providers speed time to market and enterprises simplify deployments, Dell EMC offers three validated solutions using the VEP4600. These solutions provide turnkey SD-WAN capabilities with pre-validated and pre-integrated configurations combining Dell EMC infrastructure and support services with industry-leading SD-WAN software from Silver Peak Systems, VeloCloud Networks and Versa Networks. Architected and tested to Dell EMC standards, these offerings enable customers to quickly deploy cost effective SD-WAN solutions or managed services.

Quotes

“As network traffic continues to increase, optimized service delivery is required to meet the demands of a broad range of use cases at the network edge”, said Sandra Rivera, senior vice president and general manager, Network Platforms Group, Intel. “A programmable and power efficient system-on-a-chip processor is needed to deliver the performance that users and devices require for edge applications. Using the Intel® Xeon® D-2100 system-on-a-chip in the Dell EMC Virtual Edge Platform provides flexible and power-efficient network edge solutions with high-performance compute and intelligence”. “In our research, we’re seeing more enterprise customers considering network disaggregation as a more flexible approach to building networks, similar to what happened in compute when mainframe and Unix-based servers were superseded by x86 systems,” said Brad Casemore, IDC Research Vice President, Data Center Networks. “With its universal CPE (uCPE) solution for SDN-WAN environments, Dell EMC is extending its Open Networking portfolio to the enterprise edge to accommodate the growing number of cloud-based applications that require lower latency and scalability.”

Availability:

The Dell EMC VEP4600 will begin shipping worldwide on April 24, 2018.

Designed to grow and evolve with the modern data center to support traditional and emerging workloads for years to come

Story Highlights

• Dell EMC PowerEdge MX offers high performance, modular compute, storage and networking infrastructure
• Kinetic infrastructure extends configuration flexibility to individual storage devices with built-in future-proofing to easily support configurations down to memory-centric devices
• Designed to flexibly support both traditional and emerging workloads, such as IoT, artificial intelligence and machine learning, while simplifying and consolidating IT management
• Enables optimal use of various IT resources with dynamic adjustments as needs change for greater use of IT budgets and reduced time for routine maintenance
• Dell EMC OpenManage Enterprise – Modular Edition offers comprehensive system management to ease deployment, updating and monitoring of all PowerEdge MX infrastructure components

HOPKINTON, Mass, August 21, 2018 - 

Dell EMC is launching Dell EMC PowerEdge MX, the industry’s newest high performance, modular infrastructure, designed to support a wide variety of traditional and emerging data center workloads. PowerEdge MX offers the first modular infrastructure architecture designed to easily adapt to future technologies and server disaggregation.

With its unique kinetic infrastructure, customers can break free from the bounds of technology silos and time-consuming, routine operational management while also dynamically assigning IT to optimally match different applications and needs.

“While emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, IoT and software-defined storage and networking, offer competitive benefits, their workloads can be difficult to predict and pose new challenges for IT departments,” said Ashley Gorakhpurwalla, president and general manager, Dell EMC Server and Infrastructure Systems. “PowerEdge MX enables a modular approach to flexibly build and combine compute, storage and networking, so organizations can transform their IT in a way that optimizes resources and offers investment protection for future generations of technological advances.”

Dell EMC PowerEdge MX portfolio, designed with kinetic infrastructure

The PowerEdge MX ecosystem includes a newly designed chassis and precisely-sized resource blocks of servers and storage that connect to the infrastructure through a smart I/O fabric.

The PowerEdge MX is designed for the software-defined data center—able to support a combination of dense virtualization, software-defined storage, software-defined networking, artificial intelligence and big data projects. Designed to support the latest low latency NVMe drives and native 25GbE connectivity, customers can tailor compute and storage configurations to their own requirements and benefit from shared pools of disaggregated resources to respond to changing needs as they happen. By creating on-the-fly hardware capacity, overprovisioning and stranded assets are reduced as performance and efficiency are optimized.

PowerEdge MX, with its kinetic infrastructure, is uniquely designed without a mid-plane, enabling support for multiple generations of technology releases—processor technologies, new storage types and new connectivity innovations—well into the future. Specifically, the absence of a mid-plane enables direct compute to I/O module connections, allowing for future technology upgrades without disrupting customer operations and without a mid-plane upgrade. With this approach, PowerEdge MX is prepared to one day support fully disaggregated components, down to memory-centric devices, such as storage class memory, GPUs and FPGAs, to offer customers full composability.

Customers have the flexibility to customize their PowerEdge MX with a robust portfolio of components:

• Dell EMC PowerEdge MX7000 chassis – Offers an efficient hardware foundation with support for multiple server processor generations, in a scalable system with end-to-end lifecycle management and a single interface for all components, enabling organizations to focus more on their business priorities than IT maintenance. This 7U chassis includes eight bays to accommodate a variety of single- and double-width compute and storage combinations.
• Dell EMC PowerEdge MX740c and MX840c compute sleds – Two- and four-socket blade sleds deliver full-featured, no compromise compute, with exceptional performance and a rich set of storage options including NVMe drives. The single-width MX740c and double-width MX840c support the full Intel® Xeon Scalable Processor family with up to six terabytes of memory. The MX740c is the industry’s only single-width, two-socket, modular server that can house and tier up to six 2.5” NVMe, SAS or SATA drives. The MX840c can hold up to and tier eight drives.
• Dell EMC PowerEdge MX5016s storage sled – Dense, full-width, scale-out storage sleds complement MX servers, holding up to 16 hot-pluggable SAS storage hard disk drives, with a maximum of seven MX5016s sleds in the MX chassis for up to 112 drives of direct-attached storage. These drives can be individually mapped to one or more servers, offering the ideal storage ratio needed for specific use cases.
• Dell EMC PowerEdge MX Ethernet and Fibre Channel switching modules – These new low latency, high-bandwidth switching modules for multi-chassis environments include automated processes for topology compliance, quality of service and autonomous healing for peak network performance with the PowerEdge MX single management interface. PowerEdge MX is the industry’s first modular infrastructure to deliver end-to-end 25Gpbs Ethernet (GbE) and 32Gbps Fibre Channel host connectivity. Combined with 100GbE and 32G Fibre Channel uplinks, customers can expect up to a 55% reduction in switching latency for highly-scalable, multi-chassis fabric architectures. 

The PowerEdge MX also benefits from comprehensive in-system management, including Dell EMC OpenManage Enterprise – Modular Edition, which delivers key functions of OpenManage Enterprise management within the server chassis for the entire environment. Customers can perform full lifecycle management on all PowerEdge MX components across multiple chassis at once; roll-out changes and templates faster; and access servers remotely with the Dell EMC OpenManage Mobile application and the new Quick Sync 2 feature. OpenManage Enterprise also offers management of rack and modular solutions via a single interface.

With PowerEdge MX designed for flexible customization, Dell EMC’s end-to-end support and deployment services range from delivery of a fully integrated modular solution to customized deployment and configuration to meet individual customer needs. Services also include ProSupport Plus1, which offers around the clock support, direct access to senior ProSupport Plus engineers and a designated Technology Service Manager for full system support.

Availability

• Dell EMC PowerEdge MX will be available globally beginning Sept. 12.

Supporting quotes

Francisco, Perez, Sr. Information Technology Administrator, Masergy

“The benefits of the new PowerEdge MX mirror our focus on innovation to simplify IT for our customers. This new architecture includes many features that reduce complexity, such as profile-based deployment and management and intelligent switch configurations. Its future-proof architecture, with a ‘no mid-plane’ design, eliminates bottlenecks and opens the door to easily accommodate future demands and technology.”

Matt Eastwood, senior vice president, Enterprise Datacenter, Cloud Infrastructure and Developers, IDC

“Computing platforms continue their fundamental transformation in line with the digital transformation journey that most firms have embarked on. Dell EMC PowerEdge MX is a poster child for this transformation as customers look for highly efficient and agile architectures that can easily adapt to a multitude of workloads and future technology advances.”

Matt Halcomb, technical solutions architect, World Wide Technology (WWT)

“We’re looking forward to offering PowerEdge MX to a host of customers that are looking for greater simplicity in their IT environment, but with the flexibility to support the full swath of virtual environments and workloads—all with a single source for management.  With the rise of modern workloads, such as artificial intelligence and IoT, the demands on IT are growing and are increasingly changing. An investment in PowerEdge MX can help customers tackle all of these challenges while offering investment protection to benefit from full composability down the line.”