Telco says it is the second edge site to go into commercial production this year
Finnish telco Elisa has successfully deployed its first fully automated edge data centre site which it said cuts the workhours for commissioning an edge DC site – from preparation, parameter settings to complete installation and testing – by 90% compared to doing it manually.
An Elisa spokesperson told Mobile Europe the services the facility will offer are still under development.
The DC combines Wind River’s Studio Cloud Platform as the production-grade distributed Kubernetes solution for managing cloud infrastructure with the User Plane Function (UPF) application from Elisa’s current 5G core vendor, all managed and automated by Wind River’s Studio Conductor.
In February, the two companies announced they had started to roll out a 5G distributed core platform claiming it was the first distributed and fully automated 5G edge commercial deployment in Europe. At the time Elisa said it wanted to build true “zero-touch deployment, configuration, and enablement with no operator involvement” with the ability to define, commission, and manage edge clouds from a centralised cloud.
Studio’s cloud infrastructure capabilities include a fully cloud-native, Kubernetes and container-based architecture, based on the StarlingX open source project, for distributed edge networks at scale.
The telco subsequently kicked off commercial production for its 5G edge cloud infrastructure which would support a fully containerised 5G UPF network function – leading to its latest announcement.
Elisa is also working with Wind River and an unnamed Open RAN vendor around assessing deterministic real-time processing at the far edge of the network. In this application, Wind River Studio is used as a common distributed cloud platform to host multiple vendors’ applications and multiple technologies to further extend cloudification of distributed core and radio functionalities.
Elisa cloud services VP Markus Kinnunen (pictured) said: “Constant automation development is our key to future success. Combined with Wind River´s distributed cloud capabilities, we are able to further improve our customer satisfaction by reducing the time to deploy and adding the quality of the process.”
Wind River chief product officer Avijit Sinha added: “As a leader in the 5G landscape that powers the majority of 5G vRAN/O-RAN deployments with global operators, our Wind River Studio capabilities address service providers’ complex challenge of deploying and managing a physically distributed, ultra-low latency cloud-native infrastructure.”
Kinnunen said that in addition to the rapid time to prepare, the telco also saw deployment times shrink and improvement in operations once up and running. The team was able to execute hundreds of tests and scripts before going into live network in the same amount of time that it would typically take to manually run much fewer tests in the traditional model.
In addition to the 90% savings when commissioning the site, he said the overall deployment time was reduced by around 50% thanks to process automation. In terms of quality improvements, he added that multiple tasks can now be run in parallel with minimal probability of human errors, reducing time to service while enhancing network quality.
Watch Elisa Polystar chief innovation officer Prashant Kumar discuss at Telecoms Europe Live how the company is looking at 18-month roadmaps to see where it can innovate more with data, suggesting that data sets are ever bigger and 10 to 100 times more complex.