Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, and Orange, one of the world’s leading telco operators and digital service providers, today announced a collaboration to provide the underlying common telco cloud foundation for Orange International Networks, unifying its containerized and virtual network functions with Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.
Orange started its international networks transformation journey eight years ago. Early on, it adopted a network softwarization strategy relying on virtualization of network functions to enable greater flexibility, cost efficiency and sovereignty over its networks and services deployments. More than 30 telco functions from 12 vendors were virtualized, including software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN), voice, content delivery network (CDN) and roaming. Building a telco cloud infrastructure was the cornerstone of this approach, with a footprint large enough to be less than 10 milliseconds away from any business-to-business (B2B) or wholesale customer.
To accelerate its cloud transformation and services softwarization, Orange has chosen to transition its services to a cloud-native infrastructure based on Red Hat platforms. This deployment leverages Red Hat OpenShift as a foundation for cloud-native network functions, incorporating Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization to enhance Orange’s existing expertise in virtualized workloads. Additionally, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform will enable fully automated deployment and scaling across its infrastructure. Together, Red Hat and Orange are advancing a vendor-agnostic cloud-native and automation framework for Orange’s international common telco cloud infrastructure, strengthening network services softwarization and industrialization.
The new platform will host a variety of use cases, ranging from SD-WAN and SASE gateway, to IMS, 4G and 5G core, IoT and roaming services. So far Orange has successfully deployed six new points of presence (PoPs) to run live on the platform.
This collaboration with Red Hat enables Orange to be more agile as a business to respond faster to customer needs and market opportunities. Benefits of the new platform include:
- Greater availability and operational efficiency, with improved lifecycle management and easier upgrade process with near-zero downtime;
- Flexibility, scalability and future-readiness thanks to a common platform that can host both virtualized and containerized workloads in a consistent way on any environment;
- Faster time to market via fully automated deployment and scaling and zero-touch provisioning. Outcomes include reducing the risk of human error and four times faster deployment times for a service;
- Improved resilience with infrastructure as code (IaC), which enables version control, enhances change management and allows quick redeployment of clusters and network functions in case of failure;
- Improved security capability, making use of built-in features including network and container isolation and controlled access to applications; and
- Reduced carbon footprint due to an optimized hardware setup.
Orange is on track to increase its common telco cloud infrastructure based on Red Hat OpenShift in the next two years across the globe to 75 telco cloud PoPs, migrating from its existing 50 OpenStack platforms and deploying 25 new PoPs. Helping to meet its sustainability goals, Orange will be able to reuse existing equipment and take advantage of power monitoring capabilities in Red Hat OpenShift to reduce carbon footprint.
Supporting Quotes
Fran Heeran, vice president, Global Telecommunications, Red Hat
“The Orange and Red Hat teams have built a close collaboration over the years based on transparency and simplicity. We’re delighted to see Orange unlocking significant benefits in stability, resilience and time to market with the use of Red Hat technologies. Orange is a best-practice example of harnessing end-to-end automation and cloud-native orchestration to target large scale deployments and workload migration to modern infrastructure with the help of Red Hat.”
Jean Louis Le Roux, executive vice president, International Networks, Orange, and chief technology and information officer, Orange Wholesale
“We’ve been collaborating with Red Hat in recent years on our extensive and successful network softwarization strategy, achieving flexibility and programmability objectives for services provided to large business and wholesale customers. We have recently selected Red Hat OpenShift for our next generation of telco cloud, and our move to containerization. We are very happy with the first deployments and are moving forward to cover the globe with this new technology. We are ready to host advanced telco services, such as SD-WAN, IoT, voice and mobile core within 10 milliseconds of any customer.”
