HPE, Intel and Tech Mahindra collaborate on 5G Open Source Network Initiative

HPE (Hewlett Packard Enterprises) has now revealed a new open-source programme, Open Distributed Infrastructure Management Initiative. The initiative helps companies simplify the roll-out of the 5G network infrastructure.

The Open Distributed Infrastructure Management initiative supports large scale, geographically distributed networks. It also facilitates interaction between different kinds of multi-vendor infrastructure resources.

The project has been revealed in strategic partnership with Intel and supported by the major IT players such as Apstra, Tech Mahindra, Red hat, AMI Power and others.

HPE will reveal the enterprise supported version of the open-source programme, along with the associated plug-in components by the end of Q2 2020.

Executive Opinion

VP, Telco Infrastructure Solutions at HPE, Claus Pedersen, said, "5G and Edge Computing industry initiatives will require large-scale and geographically distributed multi-vendor infrastructure deployments that can only be cost effectively realized with infrastructure-as-code automation. The Open Distributed Infrastructure Management initiative tackles network scalability challenges and the costs associated with vendor lock-in by enabling multi-vendor infrastructure deployments, the centralized deployment of standards-based fault and configuration management, and the aggregation of resource-specific status information."

Corporate VP and GM of Intel’s Network Platforms Group, Dan Rodriguez, said, "Infrastructure management and orchestration can benefit from common open source building blocks including APIs and data models. The ODIM initiative builds upon the work we have done with HPE on top of Redfish and will ultimately help Communications Service Providers and Enterprises discover and unleash the full potential of the underlying technologies in their distributed deployments."

HPE Open Distributed Infrastructure Management Initiative

While both the 3G and 4G networks are built on proprietary systems, 5G standards require an open-source platform that can use the commercial off the shelf servers. HPE will leverage a vendor-neutral approach to manage compute, storage and networking infrastructure resources across multiple vendors at scale, notes the announcement.

HPE along with its partnership with Intel has also announced that it will bring the initiative under Linux Foundation to create a partner ecosystem. It will help its ecosystem partners to deploy automated management of their networks.

As nowadays telecom companies have begun to deploy industrial Internet of Things and introduce some higher levels of automation and distributed data analysis, other industries that use these technologies can also benefit from the Open Distributed Infrastructure Management Initiative, notes the announcement.

In the month of January this year, HPE launched its HPE GreenLake Central, an Operational Console-as-a-Service Offering.