Wind River’s Titanium Cloud has been validated by Telefónica as a virtualised infrastructure manager (VIM) for UNICA, its network virtualisation initiative, set up in 2015.
Most recently UNICA has turned its attention to use cases such as for edge cloud compute such as virtual radio access networks (vRAN), multi-access edge computing (MEC) and 5G applications. All of them rely on edge cloud compute, which moves the processing out to the ‘edge’ of the network, nearer to the customer, where it can also be analysed and stored.
The benefits of this approach are less latency as processing is local and it cuts the amount of traffic crossing the network to consume centralised resources.
Low latency
Javier Gavilan, Core Network, Platforms & Transport Director at Telefónica, said in a statement, “After careful and comprehensive evaluation, Wind River Titanium Cloud stood out for its unique differentiators, such as extreme low latency and high reliability, to effectively meet the technical challenges that accompany telco cloud compute.”
Sticking with OSM
Telefónica conducted a multi-state assessment that included how well Titanium Cloud would be integrated into and work with ETSI’s Open Source Management and Network Operation (OSM) orchestration standard.
ETSI’s OSM efforts are not universally popular: NFV’s progress has been glacial and attracted some fierce criticism, suggesting that NFV is dead in the water before it ever reached its potential. It has also been panned for its narrow scope, particularly when compared to that of also open source Open Networking Automation Platform (ONAP) project, overseen by the Linux Foundation.
Although ONAP has attracted a number of operators in the almost two years since it was created (by combining the AT&T-originated OpenECOMP and the Foundation’s Open-Orchestrator projects), so far Telefónica has resisted.