#AfricaCom2015: Ericsson, Intel target large entreprises with software-defined infrastructure

Today’s organizations operate in a business climate of breakneck speed and continuous change therefore need to have Cloud solutions that enable businesses respond to these changing market forces faster.

It is in regards to this that Ericsson and Intel have partnered to come up with datacenter solution designed to help large operators and data enter service providers build the software-defined infrastructure they need to evolve their business models, lower costs and accelerate time-to-market for new services.

Announcing the partnership at AfricaCom 2015, Tumi Chamayou, Vice President Strategy Marketing and Communications , Ericsson Region Sub-Saharan Africa said that the partnership is set to help businessess respond to these changing market forces faster and deliver customer value more efficiently. “With Intel we are bringing one of the world’s first commercially available hyperscale architectures within reach of all data center owners and service providers. In this way we are accelerating the readiness of data centers for the demands of the Networked Society from a total architecture and economics perspective,” she added.

The solution dubbed as the innovative HDS 8000 is a new generation of hyperscale datacenter systems that uses the Intel Rack Scale Architecture for a disaggregated hardware approach to dramatically improve efficiency, utilization, automation and total cost of ownership.

The unique features of the HDS 8000 solution fit right into the type of rapidly scalable development that is required in Africa. The system makes data centre investments economically feasible in markets and applications where it would not have been the case previously, enabling new local applications of ICT based solutions, transforming the way we work, live and learn in accordance with Ericsson’s vision of the Networked Society.

Speaking on the same Cigdem Ertem, Middle East, Turkey and Africa Regional Director at Intel, said, “The industry is seeing an explosion of data and mobile devices that are flooding the infrastructure with demands. We are seeing purpose built hardware, deployed for specific workloads and applications, that is not flexible enough for the end-users’ needs.

He also added that enterprise customers are looking at what’s happening in the cloud and asking for flexible and more affordable infrastructure. Intel’s Rack Scale Architecture will aim to re-architect the infrastructure that runs the cloud infrastructure that runs data centers.

It gives us the ability to rapidly change the underlying infrastructure in order to solve the compute storage and networking problem as a whole. We can disaggregate the compute storage and networking resources to meet the ever changing demands of the workloads,” he concluded.

Ericsson HDS 8000 uses optical interconnect. Combining a disaggregated hardware architecture with optical interconnect removes the traditional distance and capacity limitations of electrical connections. This enables a more efficient pooling of resources, which has a positive impact on utilization and energy consumption.