SAN JOSE, California — Quanta Cloud Technology’s (QCT) latest data center technology brings the benefits of disaggregation and composable infrastructure to cloud service providers and telco service providers, said Mike Yang, president of QCT at today’s Q.synergy 2017 event.

The Rackgo R portfolio is based on the Intel Rack Scale Design (RSD) software framework, which disaggregates compute, storage, and network resources. This allows companies to more efficiently pool these resources across data centers. Intel open sourced RDS in 2016.

Basing QCT’s new data center infrastructure on RSD makes it ideal for service providers’ multi-tenant workloads, Yang said, calling Rackgo R “one of our biggest engineering investments” during his keynote speech. “We’ve been working with Intel’s team since 2015 to bring this data center innovation to market. The dream of disaggregating, pooling, composing, and decomposing data center resources has now become a reality.”

NTT Communications is a customer, and expects the system to improve “agility and flexibility,” said Junji Arakawa, senior manager, storage and cloud technology management at NTT. Other benefits he expects include “shorter time to deploy infrastructure, shared use of resources, and avoiding vendor lock-in.”

Other Japanese and Chinese telcos are using the new data center technology, according to Yang, but he won’t name names.

While the Rackgo R compliant hardware consists of a variety of QCT servers, storage, and networking products, at its core is a software tool. The QCT System Manager (QSM) software platform allows data center operators to configure and customize infrastructure using a single management tool. It allows users to spin up or spin down compute or storage resources within the same data center as workloads change.

Additionally, network maps show equipment needs in real time as devices are added or removed from the network. This allows companies to visualize what infrastructure needs to be upgraded or replaced.

Rackgo R systems that support OpenStack software are available now. Yang told SDxCentral that a VMware version will be available in early 2018, with Microsoft Windows support coming later next year.

QCT got its start as an original equipment manufacturer for hyperscale cloud service providers and enterprises. But now it’s directly competing against the likes of Cisco, Dell EMC, IBM, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), and Lenovo with its data center products.

“Network transformation has really come to the center stage,” Yang said during his keynote. “This shows great potential when the 5G era is coming — replacing proprietary and expensive infrastructure due to vendor lock-in. This technology paradigm shift will empower telco operators to win the 5G battles with more flexibility and agility.”

QCT’s white-box hardware with open software running on top of it will make it easier for telcos to deploy 5G infrastructure and other emerging technologies such as mobile-edge computing and network functions virtualization (NFV), he added.

In a later conversation, Yang wouldn’t provide specific telco use cases for the new data center technology. “Next year at Mobile World Congress we will demonstrate next-gen [data centers] based on RSD,” he said. “You will see the whole ecosystem.”

It’s a safe bet, however, that enabling 5G will be a big one.

“People are talking 5G almost everywhere,” Yang said. “And people don’t want to use vendor lock-in technologies. It’s very promising.”

QCT also participates in the Central Office Re-architected as a Datacenter (CORD) open source project. CORD uses white-box hardware and open source software-defined networking (SDN) and NFV software to bring data center economics and cloud agility to the telco central office. It’s targeted at evolving telcos toward greater software control in support of advanced services like 5G.

“Toward the end of January, we will preview the next-gen central office environment,” Yang said.

Photo: QCT President Mike Yang during his keynote at the Q.synergy 2017 event.