Telefónica will be using Ericsson’s Hyperscale Datacenter System (HDS) 8000 as part of its network functions virtualization (NFV) deployment in Germany, the companies announced Tuesday at Mobile World Congress (MWC).

Ericsson will also supply its Cloud Manager, Cloud SDN, and OpenStack-based Cloud Execution Environment. But the deal is a particularly nice win for the HDS 8000, which is based on Intel’s Rack Scale Architecture and was announced at MWC last year.

Ericsson separately announced Quanta Computer as a manufacturer of the HDS 8000. Ericsson also joined the Open Compute Project (OCP), apparently with an eye toward contributing designs suitable for hyperscale deployments.

Last year, it appeared Telefónica’s NFV architecture, named Unica, would be based on the OpenNFV platform from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE, then Hewlett-Packard Co.). The carrier is now saying the vendor selection process is ongoing and that HPE and Huawei continue to be part of the program.

Telefónica says the variety is necessary, to avoid vendor lock-in. Specifically, it wants to have multiple virtual infrastructure managers (VIMs) in Unica.

Telefónica has its own NFV management and orchestration (MANO) code, which was used to launch the open source OpenMANO project. OpenMANO, in turn, gave rise to the Open Source MANO (OSM) project launched this week.

Photo: Ericsson CEO Hans Vestberg.