Telecom giant Telefónica validated Wind River’s Titanium Cloud platform as a virtualized infrastructure manager (VIM) for NFV workloads within the operator’s Unica virtualization project. That validation included the ability to work within a multi-VIM environment.

The testing included work on the functional components of the Wind River virtualization platform. It also included interoperability testing of the Titanium Cloud with Open Source MANO (OSM) orchestration. OSM is the open source group hosted by ETSI that’s working on management and network orchestration.

The validation testing was conducted at Telefónica’s NFV Reference Lab in Madrid, Spain. The operator requires all vendors that want to provide virtual network functions (VNFs) to its Unica project to prove their products in the lab.

Telefónica is continuing to use the Wind River platform to run use case trials, including tests of hosting virtual radio access network (vRAN) use cases.

Telefónica started its Unica project in 2015. It’s an effort by the carrier to tap virtualization technologies like NFV and SDN as well as open source software to increase agility and efficiency of its network. It has recently increased its focus on edge cloud compute use cases like vRAN, multi-access edge computing (MEC), and 5G.

Javier Gavilan, director of core network, platforms and transport at Telefónica, linked the Wind River platform to supporting the carrier’s focus on 5G and edge deployments. “After careful and comprehensive evaluation, Wind River Titanium Cloud stood out for its unique differentiators, such as extreme low latency and high reliability, to effectively meet the technical challenges that accompany telco cloud compute,” Gavilan noted in a statement.

Telefónica’s OSM-based Unica efforts are analogous to what a number of other operators are doing with the ONAP initiative. Both are considered broad platforms for automating control of telecom network operations. OSM has found more favor from European-based operators, while ONAP has gained traction in North America and Asia.

Wind River's Titanium Cloud platform is based on OpenStack and is compliant with all OpenStack APIs. It is the company’s portfolio of virtualization products for data center environments.

Components of the cloud platform were donated last year to the open source StarlingX project, hosted by the OpenStack Foundation. StarlingX is a cloud infrastructure software stack for the edge targeted at industrial IoT, telecom, video delivery, and other ultra-low latency use cases.

Intel early last year sold Wind River to investment firm TPG for an undisclosed amount. Intel had originally purchased Wind River in 2009 for $884 million.