Red Hat and Intel are to collaborate in 5G and networking to speed the development of automated, cloud-native infrastructure solutions. The two players, which have a long track record of partnership, said they intend to combine R&D efforts on 5G and open source projects, like Kubernetes, to bring new services to market more quickly. They said they want to address challenges facing operators and enterprises in 5G, and help develop technology that is more flexible and automated at lower costs.
The expanded partnership, claimed the partners, will lead to more complete technology stacks for operators and foster new services for network operations, edge computing, and hybrid cloud networking. There will also be further alignment of silicon and software development to improve applications and enterprise processes.
OpenShift, Red Hat’s Kubernetes-based platform that operators are using for 5G radio access networks (RAN) and 5G network cores, will be paired with silicon, software, and tools from Intel, including the chipmaker’s FlexRAN reference software and Open Network Edge Services Software (OpenNESS) for edge computing, the companies announced.
In related news, Red Hat has added virtualisation features to its OpenShift solution in what seems to be a direct challenge to virtualisation giant VMware. Red Hat said the virtualisation capabilities, derived from the upstream KubeVirt open source project, will enable enterprises to develop, deploy and manage applications running in virtual machines (VMs) alongside container and serverless deployments. Traditional VM-based workloads, including those that run on VMware infrastructure, can be added to new and existing applications in OpenShift, where they can then be decomposed into microservices on containers over time or maintained as VMs.
The news comes in the same week that VMware chief Pat Gelsinger announced his departure from the company to return to Intel as its CEO.
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