NEC is nearing the final stages of certifying Red Hat OpenShift for its 5G core offering. The Japanese vendor, which is determined to claim a greater share of the network infrastructure market, also plans to integrate the Kubernetes-based platform into 5G radio access network (RAN) equipment and software, and mobile edge computing. 

“They want to take any of their applications that they’re putting together and have them effectively run on OpenShift as a platform,” Red Hat Chief Technologist Ian Hood told SDxCentral. 

Red Hat previously worked with NEC to integrate its OpenStack platform for NFV on 4G LTE architecture, and the companies are now expanding that work to OpenShift for 5G. It’s a journey that Red Hat is on with many other RAN and network core vendors, including Ericsson, Mavenir, and Samsung, which was the first major RAN vendor to publicly build 5G services on OpenShift in September 2020.

5G architecture and standards effectively demand a cloud-native approach framed around microservices and containers, and those can be built and deployed on OpenShift, Hood explained. The modular function base of 5G paired with OpenShift provides network operators with a level of flexibility and speed that they don’t otherwise have access to on their own tooling, he said. 

This also allows the various functions of the 5G core to run and scale up or down independently, Hood said, adding that network operators and enterprises can also “pick and choose different 5G core elements from different vendors a lot easier.”

Red Hat’s work with NEC follows the same model it’s taken with other vendors that allows service providers to activate a Kubernetes operation with consistent lifecycle management. Red Hat, which IBM acquired for $34 billion in 2019, released the latest iteration of its OpenShift platform last summer with general availability of VM management tools, Kubernetes cluster management features, and a new path for low-resource edge environments.

The most recent versions of OpenShift 4 also support real-time capabilities for latency, synchronization, and smaller form factors, Hood said. The open source software vendor is also advancing on OpenShift nodes to allow operators to have remote compute nodes that access a control plane in a centralized location, he added. 

“We’ve got a three-node version of OpenShift. We’ve got a single-node version of OpenShift coming that can run the whole thing on one node. So these are the kinds of things that are going on in OpenShift that allow us to support 5G core, RAN, and edge applications,” Hood said. 

NEC is one of the earliest 5G core and RAN vendors to announce its commercial use of OpenShift, but many others are coming, according to Hood. The intensive and collaborative process of integration, testing, and certification is something Red Hat has to replicate with each vendor, and that takes time. 

“That’s why we want this consistent set of operators that allow us to tune how we can run OpenShift for that application, and also so that they follow the rules,” Hood explained, adding that Red Hat began this process in stride for network operators about a year ago and all of the large networking vendors are down this same path. 

“Now that we've actually got it so that we can actually run networking applications in the core and in the edge on platforms like OpenShift using containers and microservices, we can now start to combine them for these enterprise use cases” in factories, distribution centers, health care, and other industries, he said. 

“We’re going to see that IT and network convergence start to happen,” Hood said. “We’ve opened up the networking world. Now we’re going to go open the industry world that has a whole collection of proprietary technologies out there that need to improve.”