AT&T is feeding the Airship open infrastructure project with more resources and bringing Dell Technologies into the community. The companies today announced plans to develop new open source automation capabilities across the infrastructure stack, including bare metal, networking equipment, and storage.

Dell Technologies and AT&T also plan to speed up the release of Airship 2.0, which is expected to be released in the first half of 2020, develop additional open source capabilities for Metal3-io and OpenStack Ironic, and integrate the Kubernetes cluster API.

Dell’s partnership with AT&T and its contributions to the Airship community will help reinforce the company’s commitment and interest in the telco industry, said Eric Vallone, director of product management of service provider solutions at Dell Technologies. “The time it takes to deploy infrastructure is one of the key obstacles in making this migration from 4G to 5G happen, making this move to SDN and virtualization happen,” he told SDxCentral. 

“The way that AT&T is approaching the work in this space is everything is open source first,” said Ryan van Wyk, assistant vice president of network cloud engineering at AT&T. “The work that’s going to happen is not only going to happen in the Airship community, but it will happen in supporting communities that Airship is integrating.”

Dell is going to help with three priorities: Redfish control of hardware, validating the hardware, and configuring hardware at the lowest levels. “Typically when you’re deploying infrastructure a lot of what’s out there today kind of assumes that some of that’s already being taken care of and there can be a lot of time lost in that and managing the lifecycle in that,” van Wyk explained. 

“Airship’s all about declaring your environment and then having Airship realize that environment and we want that to be soup-to-nuts from the role of bare metal all the way up,” he said. Operators don’t have time to use traditional data center models for deployment and this is where automation comes into play, van Wyk added.

AT&T launched Airship in May 2018 through a partnership with SK Telecom, Intel, and the Open Stack Foundation. Mirantis, Intel, RedHat, SUSE, Ericsson, and others have since joined the effort. 

AT&T and Dell are aiming to get Redfish enhancements ready later this year, followed by the hardware validation and configuration work roughly a year from now.

“How we manage and how we deploy the network is going through a significant transformation,” Vallone said. “Because of the complexities that are added or created with 5G it becomes really a challenge to massively deploy it. And from our perspective, the goal here is to really reduce, minimize, or eliminate that challenge in the deployment of these open infrastructure environments.”

Van Wyk concurred with that assessment. “It’s all about banishing complexity. If we don’t achieve some of that we just cannot keep up with the velocity demanded of us,” he said. “We need to be able to move fast, we need to be able to get the infrastructure out there quickly and we need to be able to manage it at scale as simply as possible.”

Sometimes the speed of the open source community is too fast though, according to van Wyk. “The open source community moves extremely fast with respect to getting the foundational capabilities delivered so you can do some things, you can see some things, touch them, use them. But that next step to take it from ‘I can use it’ to ‘I’m going to operationalize it in hundreds of places’ is a big leap. And that’s one of the big reasons for Airship,” he said.