AT&T partners with Dell to speed up Cloud Operations for Edge Computing and 5G Software Infrastructure

Dell Technologies and AT&T recently announced a partnership on Open Source Edge Computing and 5G Software Infrastructure. The partnership aims to deliver automated, programmable and intelligent bare-metal cloud operations to speed new service delivery.

With respect to the expertise, Dell Technologies and AT&T will collaborate in the open-source community to work towards the network disaggregation and accelerate the deployment of open infrastructure within Airship powered AT&T Network Cloud.

The Airship is a collection of loosely coupled, but interoperable, open-source tools that declaratively automate cloud provisioning and life-cycle management utilizing containers as the unit of software delivery, the announcement says.

The companies will collaborate with Airship community to accelerate the Airship towards 2.0 release. The goal is to deliver streamlined aggregator of best-of-breed open technologies for declaratively deploying and managing the cloud software and Kubernetes environments.

Executive Opinion

Vice President, AT&T Network Cloud, Amy Wheelus, said “Dell Technologies’ addition to the Airship community reaffirms the industry’s growing trust and investment in the open infrastructure model. This collaboration will not only enable us to accelerate the AT&T Network Cloud on the Dell Technologies infrastructure, but also further the broader community goal of making it as simple as possible for operators to deploy and manage open infrastructure in support of SDN and other workloads.”

Vice President, Dell EMC Service Provider Solutions, Kevin Shatzkamer, said “Dell Technologies is working closely with AT&T to combine our joint telco industry best practices with decades of data center transformation experience to help service providers quickly roll out new breeds of experiential Edge and 5G services. As the world leader in servers, storage and personal computers, Dell’s world class supply chain is best positioned to deliver the cost structure, predictability and access to emerging infrastructure technologies required to enable the transition to a more open, disaggregated mobile network.” 

More about the Dell and AT&T Collaboration

Both companies are also planning to jointly develop and enhance additional open-source efforts. OpenStack Ironic and Metal3-io, and integration with the Kubernetes Cluster API will be part of this open source collaboraion.

Further, AT&T and Dell will deliver the open-source automation capabilities across the stack – from bare metal to network to storage – on the infrastructure of Dell technologies.
The companies are even stressed the importance of edge computing in a joint announcement. Businesses need to bring computing physically closer to people and devices that need it. Cloud-native applications call for a lower latency environment.