Red Hat and Intel today announced plans to pool more research and development (R&D) in 5G and networking to quicken the commercialization of automated, cloud-native infrastructure.

The companies, which have collaborated on many projects for decades, intend to combine R&D efforts on 5G and open source projects, like Kubernetes, to bring new services to market more quickly. Intel and Red Hat want to address challenges that operators and enterprises confront in 5G and help develop technology that is more flexible and automated at lower costs.

The expanded partnership on R&D will lead to more complete technology stacks for operators and foster new services for network operations, edge computing, and hybrid cloud networking, according to the vendors.

The duo also pointed to opportunities to further align silicon and software development to improve applications and enterprise processes. 

OpenShift, Red Hat’s Kubernetes-based platform that operators are using for 5G radio access networks (RAN) and 5G network cores, will be paired with silicon, software, and tools from Intel, including the chipmaker’s FlexRAN reference software and Open Network Edge Services Software (OpenNESS) for edge computing, the companies announced.

The vision calls for flexible, multi-vendor deployment models for 5G operators across on-premise, bare metal, public or hybrid-cloud infrastructure. It also follows a cloud-based onboarding service and testbed for cloud native and virtualized network functions the vendors created in March 2020.

Red Hat and Intel are expanding that lab this year to further development of hybrid multicloud, infrastructure optimization, network controllers, programmable offerings for diverse workloads, virtualized RAN (vRAN), edge network services and toolkits for edge developers, and heterogeneous computing.

OpenShift application services paired with Intel’s Xeon Scalable processors will allow for a more flexible and consistent connection between on-premises and multicloud infrastructure, the companies said. Red Hat’s OpenShift Container Storage and Enterprise Linux will also be integrated with Intel’s OpenNESS to deliver greater operational insight and management.

The agreement also calls for Intel technology to provide better network visibility and control through the OpenShift network controller, and a joint reference architecture for 5G vRAN using the OpenShift Container Platform and OpenNESS Kubernetes Operators that will be certified with hardware vendors and cloud native function application vendors.

Finally at the edge, the companies said OpenShift and Intel technology combined with virtualized and cloud native functions in SD-WAN, networking, and security will provide a better foundation for unified management and orchestration.