SUSE announced the newest iteration of its flagship telco cloud platform SUSE ATIP 3.0 to help customers achieve faster time-to-market and future-proof their networks. This builds on SUSE's extensive experience working with telecom operators and as a key supplier for tier-1 Network Equipment Providers (NEP), such as Ericsson, Huawei, and others.
Purpose-built for telecommunications, SUSE ATIP 3.0 provides simpler and more flexible zero-touch deployment and management, setting a new benchmark for easy, GitOps-ready, operations at massive scale while bringing new, high value features to the platform. SUSE ATIP is continuously quality assured with telco-grade hardware and telco-specific configurations and workloads.
"The telco market is undergoing transformation, and our customers are responding to SUSE ATIP as it delivers on the promise of an adaptable platform for telecom operators. We are seeing adoption for a broad range of use cases across mobile and fixed networks, such as 5G Packet Core, Cloud Radio Access Network (RAN), fiber-to-the-home/building and others," said Thomas Di Giacomo, chief technology and product officer at SUSE.
SUSE ATIP 3.0 is the first commercially available telco cloud stack that is strongly aligned and co-developed with Linux Foundation Europe's Project Sylva, an initiative founded by the five largest European telecom operators Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telecom Italia, Telefonica and Vodafone as well as Ericsson and Nokia to develop a reference cloud software framework.
"Project Sylva addresses the urgent need for more commonality across open source telco-cloud stacks, since the current technical diversity across different stacks is slowing the entire ecosystem down," says Stephane Demartis, VP telco cloud infrastructure at Orange. "SUSE is a key contributor and sponsor on the project. The availability of SUSE ATIP as a commercially available support offer makes it significantly easier for us to integrate Sylva into Orange Telco Cloud, our own internal horizontal telco cloud stack, deployed across our EMEA affiliates."
Additionally, SUSE ATIP 3.0 enables telecom providers to:
- Achieve cloud native network function (CNF) deployments like 5G Packet Core and Cloud RAN at scale with telecom-grade Kubernetes clusters. SUSE ATIP 3.0 features automated zero-touch rollout and lifecycle management of Kubernetes clusters and underlying bare-metal or private cloud infrastructure.
- Protect integration investments, keep operating expenses low and maintain a flexible platform strategy with SUSE ATIP's widely adopted vendor-neutral integration points based on CNCF Cluster API. Telecom providers can unlock tremendous value from disaggregation while the adoption of Cluster API helps avoid the hidden lock-in effects often found in other solutions on the market.
- Become energy efficient by utilizing hardware more efficiently with smaller footprint components that are optimized for the telecom edge. SUSE, being a prominent member of the Linux Foundation Europe Project Sylva, contributes significantly to the open source community to create an open framework for net-zero networks through holistic carbon emissions monitoring and optimization.
- Run VMs side-by-side with containers through an integration with Kubevirt. As containers and Kubernetes are broadly accepted as the future of Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), this provides a coherent Kubernetes-native orchestration approach that allows operators to modernize their legacy virtual machine-centric telco cloud infrastructure to run containers.
- Lower CAPEX for RAN deployments which provides a proven telco-grade Kubernetes and Linux stack to support specific needs of RAN software and management solutions to deploy and manage the stack at scale.
In the Open RAN space, SUSE has partnered with Parallel Wireless, a leading provider of Open RAN platform-agnostic solutions. This collaboration aims to integrate ATIP into its ecosystem, enabling the world's first fully hardware-agnostic ORAN stack. This will allow Parallel Wireless' energy-efficient GreenRANTM solutions to flexibly manage, optimize and process data securely, while significantly reducing total cost of ownership for service operators.
SUSE ATIP has been validated for Intel® FlexRANTM on 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processor.
SUSE ATIP 3.0 will be generally available in April 2024.