Dell Technologies today expanded its pool of tools and services for telco clouds, workloads, network cores, and radio access network (RAN) architecture.

The IT enterprise juggernaut revealed Dell Telecom Multi-Cloud Foundation, an infrastructure platform that aims to help operators build and deploy open, cloud-native networks. It includes Dell hardware, the recently announced Bare Metal Orchestrator software, including new modules for network deployment and lifecycle management that deliver pre-integrated telco cloud software from Red Hat, VMware, and Wind River. 

“The goal here is to implement this more modern network and cloud-native infrastructure at speed, make it easier to consume, make it easier to digest, and easier to deploy,” said Andrew Vas, VP of product management in Dell’s Telecom Systems Business.

“If the foundation of the house, if you will, is not strong, not verified, integrated, or secure, it’s very hard to get the upper layers of the stack to work, especially in a repeatable manner,” Vas added.

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 networks. The software is also open and not tied exclusively to Dell hardware.

The Bare Metal Orchestrator Module for VMware’s Telco Cloud Platform will be available in April, followed by a module for Red Hat OpenShift and Wind River Studio in July, according to Dell Technologies.

The collection of telco software expansions are part of Dell’s aspiration to grab a larger share of the $114 billion telecom market, particularly in mobile network infrastructure, which Dell claims has architecturally shifted to be more directly served by its core business and IT strengths. 

The vendor also revealed an Open RAN Accelerator Card in partnership with Marvell that’s designed for Dell PowerEdge and other x86-based servers. The 5G layer one processing card for virtualized RAN and open RAN that offloads all layer one distributed unit functionality, according to the vendor. 

“In today’s architectures, you have an architecture where pieces of the layer one functionality get offloaded to other parts” before coming back to the CPU on the server, which requires more equipment and higher costs associated with that hardware, Vas explained. 

“A lot of the layer one functionality takes up about two thirds of the processing work on the CPU. We’re essentially freeing that up now by putting it all on this offload card,” he said. Dell Technologies expects the Open RAN Accelerator Card to be globally available in late 2022. 

Finally, Dell said it plans to release a validated design for a 5G Core with Oracle and VMware in June. “We’re basically vetting out a validated design with Oracle and we’re testing that with VMware on our servers,” Vas said.