Red Hat has released the latest version of OpenStack Platform 17, with a strong tendency towards network operators to build modern infrastructure like that needed to deliver 4G and 5G services.
Announced at this week’s MWC Las Vegas event, Red Hat OpenStack Platform 17 announced features aimed at helping service providers build large, modern networks with an open hybrid cloud in mind.
Not surprisingly, Red Hat has also glorified the benefits of integration with its OpenShift application platform that revolves around containers and Kubernetes. It will allow service providers to quickly introduce new services and applications to meet changing demand, it is claimed.
Red Hat notes that it has been more than a decade since the creation of the OpenStack project. While it started as a competitor to current private and public cloud software stacks, it has been gradually deprecated into sectors such as telecom or for users with specialized requirements, thanks to its scalability and open source nature.
This does not mean that it failed. China Mobile is said to have OpenStack running on more than six million CPU cores that support its 5G network, while CERN’s OpenStack cloud has more than 300,000 cores to meet the needs of the Large Hadron Collider.
Red Hat itself claims that its platform is one of the most prevalent frameworks for Network Function Virtualization (NFV) among service providers, with more than 30 percent of paid production LTE deployments.
This update enables greater integration of Red Hat OpenStack and OpenShift to enable operators to run Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) and Cloud Native Network Functions (CNFs) side by side in their network. This is enabled by a virtual control level on OpenShift that enables native and virtual cloud devices to operate within the same infrastructure.
Another new capability in OpenStack Platform 17 is hardware offload support for SmartNICS to provide acceleration for functions such as security suites and encryption. Support for SmartNICs is a feature added in the latest version of OpenStack, Yoga, but the OpenStack Platform 17 is based on an older Wallaby version from 2021, so Red Hat may have been integrated into some of the code from Yoga here.
Other updates include deploying high availability consoles across multiple L2 networks (Multirack HA), as well as dynamic resource allocation and simple manager deployment that allows for streamlined deployments with fewer required services and a smaller footprint, according to Red Hat.
The new cephadm integration enables OpenStack Platform 17 to more easily deploy and manage Red Hat Ceph Storage 5, the company’s latest iteration of the company’s programmatically defined file, block, and object storage system.
Workload and network migration tools have also been added to help validate migration from Open vSwitch (OVS) to OVN, plus Red Hat says it now offers extended lifecycle management to enable continuous feature updates.
“With the latest version of the Red Hat OpenStack Platform, integrated with Red Hat OpenShift, service providers will be able to achieve more use cases such as 5G core, and advanced deployments, including hyperconverged infrastructure, networking, storage, compute and open access networks. To Virtual Radio, Maria Bracho, Red Hat’s principal product manager, said in a statement.
This version of the Red Hat OpenStack Platform requires the latest version of the company’s operating system, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.0 Extended Update Support (EUS). OpenStack Platform 17 is available through the Red Hat Customer Portal for subscription organizations. ®
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