Red Hat and Orange have announced a collaboration to provide the underlying common cloud platform for Orange International Networks, unifying their virtualized and containerized network functions with Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.
Eight years ago, Orange began its journey to transform its international networks. From the outset, it adopted a network softwareization strategy based on the virtualization of network functions to enable greater flexibility, cost efficiency, and sovereignty over its network and service deployments. More than 30 telecommunications functions from 12 vendors were virtualized, including software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN), voice, content delivery network (CDN), and roaming. The key was to build a cloud-based telecommunications network with such broad coverage that it ensures being within 10 milliseconds of any customer.
To accelerate its transformation to the cloud and the softwareization of its services, Orange has opted to migrate its services to a cloud-native infrastructure based on Red Hat platforms. This deployment leverages Red Hat OpenShift as the foundation for cloud-native network functions, incorporating Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization to enhance Orange’s existing experience with virtualized workloads. Additionally, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform will enable fully automated deployment and scaling across its entire infrastructure. Red Hat and Orange are collaborating to create a cloud-native and automation platform that is compatible with any vendor. This applies to Orange’s global infrastructure, reinforcing the digitization and standardization of network services.
The new platform will host a variety of use cases, ranging from SD-WAN and SASE gateways to IMS, 4G and 5G core, IoT, and roaming services. So far, Orange has successfully deployed six new points of presence (PoPs) that are already in production on the platform.
This collaboration with Red Hat enables Orange to be more agile as a company to respond more quickly to customer needs and market opportunities. The benefits of the new platform include:
- Increased availability and operational efficiency, with improved lifecycle management and a more straightforward upgrade process with near-zero downtime.
- Flexibility, scalability, and future readiness through a common platform that can host both virtualized and containerized workloads consistently across any environment.
- Faster time to market thanks to fully automated deployment and scaling, along with zero-touch provisioning. Outcomes include a reduction in the risk of human error and service deployment times that are four times faster.
- Enhanced resilience with infrastructure as code (IaC), allowing for version control, improved change management, and rapid redeployment of clusters and network functions in the event of a failure.
- Improved security capabilities, leveraging built-in features including network and container isolation and controlled access to applications.
- Reduction in carbon footprint due to optimized hardware configuration.
Orange is on track to expand its common telecom cloud infrastructure based on Red Hat OpenShift to 75 PoPs worldwide over the next two years, migrating from its 50 existing OpenStack platforms and implementing 25 new PoPs. To help achieve its sustainability goals, Orange will be able to reuse existing equipment and leverage the energy consumption monitoring capabilities of Red Hat OpenShift to reduce its carbon footprint.