Telenor has assembled a multi-vendor, 5G core environment consisting of best of breed Network Functions from Oracle, Casa-Systems, Enea and Kaloom, all running on Red Hat’s Openshift Kubernetes platform.
Kaloom, along with its partner MBUZZ Europe, confirmed that it has provided its 5G packet core User Plane Function (UPF) within Telenor’s larger ecosystem of integrated partner solutions in a unique cloud-native trial to gauge the readiness of cloud-native deployments.
Telenor recently demonstrated its Proof-of-Concept (PoC) trial with Kaloom’s UPF offering, as well as Telenor’s other partners’ web-scale, cloud-native technologies. With the eventual goal of commercializing a vendor neutral standalone 5G Core solution, the PoC demonstrated Telenor’s ability to on-board network functions provided by vendors such as Kaloom onto a microservices-based, containerized, vendor-neutral Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) architecture that features scalability, user-friendliness, resource efficiency and openness.
Kaloom’s 5G packet core User Plane Function (UPF) integrates with Red Hat OpenShift and provides a multi-tenant, high performance (multi-Tbps throughput capacity), low latency, cloud-native solution with embedded support for more secure 5G network slicing complemented by full automation capabilities to enable faster time to services and 10X TCO savings. 5G network slicing enables the creation of virtual data centers whereby an edge data center can be partitioned into multiple independent virtual data centers, where each virtual data center is provided its own virtual fabric. Each vFabric can be assigned to a different operator/customer, thus enabling multiple operators to share a common distributed cloud architecture. Tenant separation is flexible as separation is done at the hardware (port) level with full isolation offering better security and better quality of experience.
“This trial proves that a multi-vendor 5G Core is indeed possible on a vendor neutral platform. It is important to mention that we were positively surprised by the readiness of the involved partners for cloud native,” says Patrick Waldemar, Vice President, Telenor Research.
“As the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform, Red Hat OpenShift is an ideal platform to run multi-vendor, interoperable functions as a single cloud platform. Our collaboration with Kaloom enables networking, including 5G-UPF services as a first-class citizen in a containerized world, thus reducing operational challenges and accelerating time to productivity,” said Darrell Jordan-Smith, senior vice president, Industries and Global Accounts, Red Hat.
