Quanta x86 Servers Shipped to 5G Telco

Aaron Lee, Japan; Willis Ke, DIGITIMES

https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20190225PD204.html

Monday 25 February 2019
 
Taiwan DOM Quanta Computer has reportedly kicked off shipments of servers adopting Intel x86 processors to Japan's new telecom operator Rakuten Mobile Network (RMN), marking a successful entry into the immense market for 5G central office telecom equipment, according to industry sources.Quanta has partnered with telecom equipment maker Nokia to supply x86 servers and server cabinets to RMN, the telecom arm of Japan's e-commerce giant Rakuten Group and approved to officially operate as Japan's fourth wireless telecom service provider in October 2019, the sources said.

(picture below) Test-Drive Red Hat OpenShift via Hyperscalers' Lab as a Service LaaS 

The sources attributed Quanta's successful market penetration partly to recommendation by its close partners Nokia and Ericsson and partly to promotion campaigns by Intel, which has dominated 95% of the global market for x86 server processors.

(picture below) Test-Drive Red Hat OpenStack via Hyperscalers' Lab as a Service LaaS

As a new telecom operator, RMN enjoys great flexibility in procuring related equipment, and its incorporation of x86 servers is expected to cause many other peers to adopt such servers to replace traditional central office equipment bearing higher prices and special specs, the sources indicated.

At the moment, the US-based Open Networking Foundation (ONF) has been an active pusher for x86 servers at telecom operators. With major members including AT&T, Verizon, Google and China Unicom, the ONF is aggressively promoting the adoption of CORD (central office re-architected as a datacenter) solutions, seeking to virtualize related hardware devices

The foundation estimates that some 70% of global telecom operators will incorporate CORD into their equipment deployments in the next five years, and global CORD market scale will expand to US$300 billion thanks to the growing demand boom and the increasing maturity of network functions virtualization (NFR) and software-defined networking (SDN) technologies.

(picture below) Test-Drive Red Hat OpenStack via Hyperscalers' Lab as a Service LaaS

At the 2019 MWC running February 25-28 in Barcelona, Quanta is displaying its new generation telecom virtualization architecture solutions developed in cooperation with many software developers including 5G core network software providers ASTRI and netElastic and OpenDAYlight-based SDN controller Lumina. The company is also demonstrating NFVI (NFV infrastructure) solutions developed in collaboration with Spirent, information security protection solutions offered by F5 Networks, and vCDN architecture provided by Qwilt.