SDxCentral | February 11, 2019
Ericsson and Intel are jointly developing a hardware management platform for service providers targeting 5G, NFV, and distributed cloud. The new platform combines hardware and software: Ericsson SDI Manager software and Intel Rack Scale Design(RSD) architecture and software. It will also maintain full backward compatibility for Ericsson customers. RSD is Intel’s reference architecture for disaggregated, composable infrastructure. Ericsson’s software-defined infrastructure (SDI) system is based on Intel RSD and provides a common managed hardware pool for all workloads that dynamically scales. Converging the two will enable faster service rollout and more efficient hardware utilization, according to Intel and Ericsson. The partnership will “help communications service providers remove deployment barriers, reduce costs, and deliver new 5G and edge services with cloud-like speed on a flexible, programmable, and intelligent network,” said Sandra Rivera, senior vice president of Intel’s Network Platform Group, in a statement. Lars Mårtensson, head of cloud and NFV infrastructure for Ericsson’s Business Area Digital Services division, added that the collaboration will “be truly transformative for service providers’ ability to successfully deploy open cloud and NFV infrastructure, from centralized data centers to the edge.” As part of the multi-year agreement, the two vendors will also align the development efforts of Ericsson SDI Manager software and Intel RSD. Jointly developed software and hardware from the partnership will be offered in future Ericsson hardware platforms and may also be offered with Intel’s server products sold by its partners. The companies will show the Ericsson SDI Manager later this month at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
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