Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), a leading provider of open source solutions, announced it is collaborating with Orange, a major multinational telecom operator, to build a modern infrastructure for an agile, responsive network aimed at bringing innovations to customers more quickly and scaling out services dynamically. They are collaborating in open source community projects to accelerate technology innovation in network virtualization, while Orange is using Red Hat OpenStack Platform for its network functions virtualization infrastructure (NFVi) deployments.
We are keen to spearhead development for technology platforms that can power our future networks, like OpenStack, and are teaming closely with Red Hat to drive innovation in open communities to help shape them in line with real-world requirements.
Christian Gacon, Vice President, Wireline Networks and Infrastructure, Orange, said:
Orange is collaborating with Red Hat as part of a joint engineering program to deliver additional features supporting NFV into OpenStack and other open source communities. The intent of the program is to better address the specific needs of communications service providers and their networks when developing technologies. This community collaboration recently led to the integration of the OpenStack BGP VPN project and its reference implementation (BaGPipe), with Orange as a lead contributor. This BGP VPN project aims at letting telecom operators mutually interconnect Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) or NFV datacenters and businesses, using industry-standard routing technologies.
Orange is embracing NFV as part of its network transformation strategy, aiming to benefit from greater agility that can be enabled by decoupling its software layer from the hardware stack. To do so, Orange is using Red Hat OpenStack Platform, for its multinational NFV deployment of massively-scalable and agile cloud IaaS, enabling better integration of virtual network functions (VNFs) from a range of vendors.