Dell offers 57% Opex savings for SPs deploying Bare Metal Orchestrator

Dell Technologies has launched a new telecom software to help telecom service providers (CSPs) accelerate their cloud-native network deployments and create new revenue opportunities at the edge.
Dell Technologies at MWC 2017The Bare Metal Orchestrator software is a paid software tool to help carriers manage fleets of computers. Dell said the product will be available in November.

“Bare Metal Orchestrator gives services providers an easier way to deploy and manage open network infrastructure while saving costs and time,” Dennis Hoffman, senior vice president and general manager, Dell Technologies Telecom Systems Business, said in a statement.

The Dell Bare Metal Orchestrator telecom software will automate the deployment and management of hundreds of thousands of servers across geographic locations to support ORAN and 5G deployments.

Dell said Bare Metal Orchestrator, the company’s first software to come from its Project Metalweaver initiative,  gives SPs the tools to discover and inventory servers, bring them online and deploy software, regardless of where they reside in the network.

Bare Metal Orchestrator tells the targeted server what to do, so that tasks and workflows – such as deploying software stacks and workloads – can be completed quickly and efficiently without human intervention. The software combines open standards technology with Dell Technologies intellectual property.

SPs can use Bare Metal Orchestrator to eliminate days or weeks of configuration and provisioning to bring network hardware into a workload-ready state. This reduces the time it takes for an open network to deliver differentiated, profitable services at scale.

The software can reduce operational costs by orchestrating server lifecycle management and minimizing errors and reliance on IT expertise. ACG Research estimates an up to 57 percent Opex savings for CSPs deploying Bare Metal Orchestrator in their networks.

T-Mobile, which is preparing for the future of 5G mobility and edge, have been collaborating with Dell Technologies to develop a product that allows engineers to drastically reduce the time spent managing thousands of servers across hundreds of sites,” said Quaid Campbell, director, network engineering cloud services, T-Mobile.

Caroline Chappell, research director, Analysys Mason, said: “Bare metal orchestrators from Dell will be key to the flexible and efficient automation of the heterogeneous bare metal environments operators tell us they need to underpin cloud-native open RAN functions.”

Dell has been working to take advantage of an industry-wide movement toward Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN), where telecommunications carriers use software to run network functions on standardized computing hardware, rather than buying almost all the gear in the network from Nokia, Ericsson or Huawei Technologies.

Dell makes the computing hardware that goes into the networks and has secured deals to help DISH Network in the United States and Vodafone and Orange in Europe build 5G networks using the technology.