Alcatel-Lucent said fresh collaboration agreements with Red Hat, Advantech and 6Wind will boost its ability to meet service providers' large-scale performance and reliability requirements by improving its virtualised RAN (vRAN) products.
The vendor said that the trio of companies are industry leaders in the areas of cloud software and hardware, and that it will leverage the agreements to enhance the vRAN technology on its CloudBand NFV platform. That, in turn, will deliver the improvements service providers need to cope with growing consumer demand for video data applications, rising Internet of Things (IoT) deployments, and the evolution to 5G technology.
Glenn Booth, VP of wireless portfolio management and strategy at Alcatel-Lucent, said the vendor utilises collaboration agreements "to integrate leading third-party technologies and deliver world-class products that meet the unique needs of our service provider customers."
The deals with Red Hat, Advantech and 6Wind will accelerate "availability of our vRAN, giving operators the flexibility and efficiency they require on a large-scale to meet subscriber data demand into the future," Booth added.
In a statement, Alcatel-Lucent explained it has extended an existing agreement with Red Hat to cover enhancements to NFV-based features in its Cloud Band NFV platform and the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack platform. Advantech will provide a high-density carrier-grade blade server that meets required standards for North American service providers and fits in a standard rack. The vendor's agreement with 6Wind covers a product that offers a variety of networking and security protocols that Alcatel-Lucent said would enable it to optimise the performance of its vRAN technology.
The vendor said it would leverage a recently extended collaboration with Intel together with the three new deals to deliver a fully NFV-compliant vRAN that meets service providers' high performance and high availability cloud needs. Alcatel-Lucent added that its vRAN product is close to being a commercial reality, with service provider trials underway in Europe, North America and Asia using a platform based on the three software and hardware companies' kit.
Alcatel-Lucent said that it will expand its trials in 2016 by using the CloudBand NFV platform to onboard and manage applications.
For more:
- see this Alcatel-Lucent announcement
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