With 5G access now commercially available in select cities around the globe, market adoption is expected to increase rapidly — with both consumers and enterprises embracing this new technology to boost agility and competitiveness.

Although 5G is still in the introductory phase, industry<\/a> momentum will likely accelerate its evolution and maturity over the next few years. However, as part of this process, commercial rollouts will certainly reveal new operational challenges. For this reason, now<\/em> is the perfect time to identify and resolve some of the more significant near-term challenges that service providers will face when planning and deploying 5G networks on a large scale.

Complexity lies ahead<\/strong>

5G networks promise to deliver a diverse suite of new consumer and enterprise wireless services based on faster download speeds, lower latency and support for wide-scale device-to-device connectivity in the form of Internet of Things (IoT).

In order to support the infrastructure requirements for these diverse capabilities, 5G standards make extensive use of virtualization technologies such as network functions virtualization (NFV) and network slicing to cost-effectively deliver the needed scalability and performance.

However, as communications service providers begin to deploy the core and edge physical infrastructure that underlies virtual 5G telco clouds, the operational complexities associated with provisioning, managing and monitoring larger inventories of geographically distributed compute, storage and Ethernet switching resources will grow exponentially, posing the potential to derail 5G’s growth trajectory. Fortunately, there is a way to resolve 5G operational complexity and ensure cost-effective physical infrastructure management on a network-wide scale.

Enabling multivendor platforms<\/strong>

As communication service providers design their core and edge 5G telco cloud<\/a> platforms, they would benefit greatly from a simplified approach to distributed, multivendor physical infrastructure management. However, whether based on HPE<\/a> iLO, IPMI, DMTF Redfish®, SNMP, Netconf or some other interface and associated data model between system management software and platform hardware, the reality today is that data center<\/a> physical infrastructure management solutions do not typically support multivendor hardware configurations, nor do they necessarily scale to support geographically distributed multi-site deployments.

Recognizing this solution gap and the need for near-term resolution, HPE, along with industry partners, announced the creation of an Open Distributed Infrastructure Management initiative<\/a> to foster open source collaboration and accelerate technological innovation. This initiative defines a new approach for openness, simplicity and scalability that will not only facilitate automated infrastructure-as-code management of geographically distributed hardware resources, but also pave the way for building multivendor cloud platforms.

How we’re changing the way telco clouds are built<\/strong>

Achieving automated hardware management across multivendor telco cloud platforms requires both a centralized resource manager and a single aggregated view of all available distributed infrastructure resources. HPE’s resource aggregator solution is a standards-based middleware offering that discovers and consolidates an integrated view of all distributed physical infrastructure and presents this inventory status model to the network operator’s centralized resource management system. Thus, it enables network-wide infrastructure-as-code automation.

A key feature of the HPE resource aggregator solution is its industry-standard DMTF Redfish®-based API interface that facilitates interaction between the disparate underlying multivendor compute, storage and Ethernet switching resources and a single overarching infrastructure management solution. Additionally, to facilitate the inclusion of legacy non-Redfish-compliant hardware resources within this unified software-defined approach, the HPE resource aggregator provides a plug-in layer that delivers the ability to build vendor-specific software plug-ins that support hardware-specific protocol mediation with the DMTF Redfish® standards.

Driving better business outcomes
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With network launches and service adoption gaining momentum, 5G promises to be both a platform for technology innovation and an enabler of business growth. Having the ability to integrate multivendor core and edge compute, storage and Ethernet switching resources within a single open physical infrastructure management framework provides telecommunications network operators with advantages that include reduced vendor lock-in, superior network-wide scalability and lower operational complexity.

With the HPE Open Distributed Infrastructure Management Resource Aggregator solution<\/a> and associated open source initiatives, HPE, along with key technology partners, is helping to create an industry ecosystem that will accelerate technology evolution. As a result, telecommunications service providers<\/a> will be better equipped to deliver on the exciting promises of 5G.