Hewlett Packard Enterprise Launches Platform for Real-Time Processing at the Telecommunications Edge

Author photo: Chantal Polsonetti
ByChantal Polsonetti
Category:
Company and Product News

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced the HPE Edgeline EL8000 Converged Edge System to help communication service providers (CSP) capitalize on data-intensive, low-latency services for media delivery, connected mobility, and smart cities. The new system helps enable CSPs to process vast amounts of data in real time directly at the edge, based on open standards to boost flexibility and reduce costs.  HPE also announced collaborations with Samsung and Tech Mahindra to accelerate CSPs 5G adoption, leveraging the HPE Edgeline EL8000 Converged Edge System to deploy the next generation of edge-centric virtual 5G applications.

To deliver new services that tap into the growth of real-time data, CSPs must transform their telecommunications network edge towards standard IT systems and software-defined architectures, such as virtual radio access networks (vRAN) and virtual cable modem termination systems (vCMTS). The open standards based HPE Edgeline EL8000 Converged Edge System was therefore developed as a cost effective replacement for CSPs’ current proprietary edge systems, with enhanced performance and versatility for data-intensive real-time digital services. Additionally, the HPE Edgeline EL8000 Converged Edge System’s design delivers high performance and ultra-low latency for the most demanding use cases, including media streaming, IoT, artificial intelligence, and video analytics, in a compact and ruggedized form factor, equipped with edge optimized serviceability and remote systems management.

The massive growth of data volumes requires that CSPs deploy high-performance edge systems in their cell sites, often in remote and harsh environments.  Moreover, this infrastructure must support many workload and quality-of-service requirements for which tailored slices of the network are employed.  The HPE Edgeline EL8000 Converged Edge System delivers a combination of capabilities to meet these challenges, including:

  • Compact and ruggedized design optimized for harsh cell-site locations – Exceeding the requirements of industry standards NEBS and ASHRAE class 3 and 4, the system is resistant against hazardous environmental influences like heat, shock and vibration, as well as failover, supporting continuous operation between 0 and 55 degrees Celsius. The system can run rack mounted or stand-alone in any space available, with either a front-to-back and back-to-front cooling design.
  • Low-latency, high-performance system design powers data intensive applications at the edge – The single-socket design, equipped with high-end Intel Xeon Scalable Processors, reduces latency and energy consumption. System components can be combined, scaled and hot-swapped to meet changing demands, supporting, among others, NVIDIA Tesla GPUs, FPGAs from Intel and Xilinx, NICs from Intel or Mellanox, up to 1.5TB of memory and 16TB of storage.
  • Modular blade and chassis options for use-case flexibility – With a range of depth and width options for blades and chassis, the system can be flexibly configured and scaled to meet new or changing use-case requirements. The flexible design allows CSPs to extend small- and microcell deployments, ensuring that cellular coverage can keep pace with increasing numbers of connected devices.
  • One-click provisioning and remote systems management ensures continuous availability and performance in far-flung cell-sites – HPE’s HPE iLO 5 technology and the newly developed chassis manager software enable remote provisioning, ongoing system health monitoring, updates, and management of HPE Edgeline EL8000 Converged Edge Systems across thousands of cell sites, from cell towers to oil rigs, without needing IT expertise on site.

To help CSPs accelerate their 5G transformation, HPE and Samsung Electronics Corporation (SEC) are collaborating to provide a joint edge-to-core vRAN commercial solution based on Samsung’s radio network technologies and system integration services, and the HPE Edgeline EL8000 Converged Edge System.

While some CSPs aim to deploy 5G from 2020 onwards, others may not be able to do so for a few years, potentially leaving entire regions without 5G coverage.  As part of this interim process CSPs are turning to multi-access edge computing (MEC) software, which delivers many of the benefits of 5G, but using 4G LTE infrastructure.  For this reason, HPE is collaborating with Tech Mahindra, a global leader in MEC software, to deliver MEC solutions based on the HPE Edgeline EL8000 Converged Edge System. 

 The HPE Edgeline EL8000 Converged Edge System will be available worldwide from June 2019.

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