Dell Technologies today announced 5G network deployment and management orchestration software and pre-integrated services to assist operators introducing open radio access network (RAN) architecture. 

Bare Metal Orchestrator, the vendor’s first software effort from its Project Metalweaver initiative, is designed to automate service delivery, tasks, and workflows across hundreds of thousands of servers running 5G and open RAN networks. 

As network functions and services migrate out to the edge, and ultimately the RAN, operators face increased complexity and costs to manage storage and networking infrastructure from multiple vendors, explained Dennis Hoffman, SVP and GM of Dell’s Telecom Systems business unit. 

“Bare Metal Orchestrator is open. It’s not at all tied to Dell infrastructure,” and provides operators with the freedom to run infrastructure from other vendors above it, Hoffman said. 

“It dramatically reduces the cost of managing increasingly intelligent networks while providing openness and choice of software above it,” he added. “A big problem is that heretofore the only way you could kind of get platform-independent bare metal orchestration is from very, very small companies that carriers can’t really bet the farm on.”

The initial release of Bare Metal Orchestrator focuses on compute, because that’s the technology creating the greatest management challenge for operators today, but Dell intends to extend it to networking and storage equipment down the line. 

Dell doesn’t plan to support radio units with the software, and Hoffman declined to comment on the extent to which the company might develop radio software in the future.

More broadly, however, the growing industry-wide push to disaggregate the RAN with open source software and commoditized equipment benefits Dell because it can now target multiple layers of telecommunications network infrastructure.

“This is a pattern that we’ve seen repeat itself. The data center opened up pretty significantly, and now the opening up of the data center is beginning to ripple through the network,” Hoffman said. Dell plans to stick to its competitive strengths in driving that by developing software, services, and hardware for mobile network transformation, he added.

While many of the world’s largest operators previously virtualized network cores, the follow-on advancements to edge computing open new opportunities and challenges, according to Hoffman. 

“The edge is interesting because there isn’t one edge. What is an edge? It’s where digital technology stops and humans and analog technology starts,” he said. 

Some operators are building a services edge in the middle of the network in central offices or local data centers, and others are pushing edge compute past the cell tower and into the enterprise itself connected to on-premises equipment managed by a network operator or vendor, Hoffman explained.

“To Dell, to us strategically, there’s nothing more important than performing well and winning our fair share of the edge opportunity. And in many ways, you can see the telecom industry as a part of that,” he said.

The level of influence mobile network operators ultimately have at the edge depends on execution and business outcomes, according to Hoffman. “Businesses don’t want multiple edge stacks. They don’t want an Amazon Outpost and an Azure stack and a stack from a communications service provider all running one application each.”

Businesses want to replicate data center operations with horizontal infrastructure running apps, he said. Dell intends to sell equipment, software, and services directly or through operator partners depending on the edge workload or application driving an enterprise’s edge strategy, Hoffman added.

“At the moment I think we believe, like communications service providers do, that they’ve got a big chunk of this and we want them to get as much of it as they can,” he said. 

Dell Technologies today also announced validated reference architectures and services to support Mavenir Open vRAN, VMware’s Telco Cloud Platform, Wind River Studio, and a service-level agreement based support service for network operators using Dell infrastructure.