Musing at the edge

Edited 25th of November.

With the global edge computing market expected to reach $6.72 billion by 2022 service providers are entering a crucial period of disruption for which they must be ready. Although still a nascent space, organisations are already gearing up to take advantage of networking at the digital edge, with 29% of respondents to our recent Twitter poll looking forward to decreased latency as a result of the infrastructure overhaul. The edge era is well and truly underway.

At VMWorld Europe 2019, alongside MobiledgeX, we were able to show visitors first-hand the advantages of operating at the edge with our augmented reality air hockey game. It demonstrated what’s possible with increased application efficiency thanks to lower latency levels, utilising the Dell Technology edge stack and the VMware NFV reference architecture with VIO 5.1 (that’s Openstack with DPDK optimisation to get the best latency out of the VNF, including integration into NSX-T virtual switch). Things got pretty competitive!

As more and more telco organisations move their infrastructure, network functions and applications to ubiquitous cloud architectures, from the core to the edge, the position of software providers, like VMware becomes invaluable. Over the last few years VMware’s proven its commitment to run any workload, anywhere on any device - but at VMWorld Europe it took this to the next level. Accelerated by 5G developments, VMware discussed its recent announcements that will aid telco’s convergence of IT and cloud at the edge – a huge opportunity!  

To achieve this, service providers are preparing to transform the infrastructure of their networks from hardware-centric to software-focused, and VMware’s strategic projects and acquisitions are designed to help capitalise on the edge economy. These include:

·      Smart Assurance, a real-time automated service assurance solution that provides CSPs with the operational intelligence to manage physical and virtual networks at once. It ensures edge and telco cloud services are compliant and optimises performance by providing deep monitoring visibility.

·      Project Maestro, a telco cloud orchestration solution that accelerates the time-to-market of modern network functions and services. The project puts VMware in a position to deliver an all-encompassing telco solution, both at the edge, core and in the cloud.

·      Uhana is a vRAN, AI automation platform that uses deep learning techniques to make decisions in real-time to optimise telco networks.  It leverages automation and network programmability to meet low latency requirements.

·      Project Milky Way a project in partnership with Dell Technologies closes the data sharing gap in regulated environments such as healthcare. This allows researchers to share analytics models between data providers across the globe without having to move the data around or give visibility to the dataset where it can't be shared, simple. This is truly edge at its best.

·      Project VXR is an advanced R&D project that gives enterprises a platform for spatial computing. It provides both a cross-platform and secure AR/VR experience that can utilise the data and metadata being stored at the edge. This can be used to provide next-generation training or to create a digital workspace that makes the most of your environment.

·      Bitfusion focuses on the granular virtualisation and sharing of GPU and FPGA, helping to improve the efficiency of AI technologies on premises and in hybrid cloud environments. This will be key to sharing resources at the edge, while keeping costs down as customers leverage more and more AI and ML techniques.

It’s clear that VMware has made significant investments to bolster both its edge and telco cloud portfolio and is prepared to deploy enterprise workloads alongside telco VNF for mobile packet core. These announcements will help telcos in the 5G world become more agile, delivering at the edge to deploy services to customers, in turn reducing costs and network reliability, while creating new revenue streams. VMware’s focus on service providers can help telcos get there first.

This will present new challenges for service providers as they attempt to disaggregate hardware from software to simplify the network architecture. While this sounds simple, to capture the full value of virtualisation, deployments must be validated from end-to-end, in combination with the hardware that will still exist.

Here at WWT, we’re playing our part, making things simpler for service providers with our Advanced Technology Centre, where we can replicate typical production environments. This can help service providers to shorten the time it takes to bring new services to market by incorporating the latest industry tools. Once validated we can help organisations integrate this at scale.

As the excitement around 5G builds, the race is on and service providers that have the infrastructure in place to support telcos will have a significant advantage. Here at WWT we can help support you with the outcomes you’re trying to create, and I encourage you to reach out to find out how. It would be my pleasure to take you through the new solutions and test these in our ATC.