Red Hat, Inc. announced a collaboration with NVIDIA to deliver radio access network (RAN) deployments on industry-standard servers across hybrid and multicloud. From private datacenters to multiple public clouds to the network edge, Red Hat OpenShift, the industry's leading enterprise Kubernetes platform, now supports NVIDIA converged accelerators and the NVIDIA Aerial SDK for software-defined 5G virtual radio access networks (vRAN) and enterprise AI applications. This delivers a composable infrastructure to customers, enabling them to better meet the data demands of compute-heavy applications for edge computing, private 5G, artificial intelligence (AI) and more, with greater flexibility and interoperability, risk mitigation and a faster return on investment.

A composable infrastructure helps to streamline resources and optimize existing IT environments by removing the need for specialized, space-consuming hardware and specialized software. NVIDIA GPUs, DPUs and converged accelerators, which combine a NVIDIA Ampere GPU with a NVIDIA BlueField-2 in a single, high performance package, can take the load off of traditional CPUs by disaggregating compute, storage and networking resources to process packets faster and with greater security measures by isolating infrastructure-heavy tasks.

With Red Hat support of NVIDIA converged accelerators and the NVIDIA Aerial SDK, customers can benefit from:

• Lower total cost of ownership (TCO), reducing overall systems costs associated with deploying and maintaining RAN and AI at scale;
• Greater acceleration of network deployments across the hybrid and multicloud, setting the stage for multi-tenancy and RAN-as-a-service;
• Composable infrastructure, which mitigates the need for specialized hardware, which, when combined with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, provides low latency and enhanced consistency;
• Connectivity for billions of devices, extending the reach of AI capabilities and applications to all devices at the edge;
• The acceleration of additional use cases including multi-access edge computing (MEC), autonomous vehicles, industrial and agricultural, by enabling AI and machine learning (ML) at the edge.

NVIDIA Aerial is an application framework for building high-performance, software-defined, cloud-native 5G RAN applications at scale to address increasing consumer demand. In addition to Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes and Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security helps better manage and secure their multicluster applications without inhibiting performance. This will put service providers in a better position to meet the data demands of compute heavy applications without sacrificing security capabilities and management.

In the coming year, Mavenir, the end-to-end network software provider, is set to implement Red Hat and NVIDIA technology for its unique AI-on-5G solution. This pre-packaged network solution will aim to provide a unified single pane of glass with analytics, allowing seamless, cost-effective management and operations of a private 5G network.