Intel and Ericsson partner for 5G platform

Intel and Ericsson have partnered in order to align their ongoing developments of Ericsson’s software-defined infrastructure (SDI) and Intel’s Rack Scale Design.

As part of the multi-year agreement, Ericsson and Intel will converge Ericsson SDI manager software and Intel RSD reference software while maintaining full backward compatibility for current customers. Ericsson SDI system is based on Intel RSD and provides a common managed hardware pool for all workloads

Ultimately, the vendors plan a next-generation infrastructure management platform to deliver agility, transparency and efficiency for 5G, distributed cloud and network functions virtualisation (NFV).

This infrastructure means a next-generation hardware management platform with the promise of extending the agility of the cloud to the hardware infrastructure layer.

Services providers are set to benefit from this new platform as it will help “speed time-to-market, maximise utilisation, and reduce total cost of ownership”.

“We have long history of successful collaboration with Intel. This new collaboration will focus on software in addition to hardware and we see it to be truly transformative for service providers’ ability to successfully deploy open cloud and NFV infrastructure, from centralized data centres to the edge,” said Lars Mårtensson, head of cloud and NFV infrastructure, business area digital services at Ericsson.

“Intel and Ericsson’s joint efforts significantly strengthen the competitiveness and roadmap of the Ericsson Software Defined Infrastructure offering.”

Jointly-developed software and hardware innovations resulting from the collaboration will be offered in subsequent Ericsson hardware platforms and may also be offered with Intel’s server products.

“5G will be transformative, accelerating today’s applications and triggering a wave of new usages and edge-based innovation,” said Sandra Rivera, senior vice president, network platform group at Intel.

“Our infrastructure manageability collaboration with Ericsson will help communications service providers remove deployment barriers, reduce costs, and deliver new 5G and edge services with cloud-like speed on a flexible, programmable and intelligent network.”