Intel and Wind River: Teamwork makes the Dream Work

It’s been a busy year for Intel and Wind River in telecommunications. In addition to the deployments we’ve been a part of at Verizon, Vodafone and KDDI, there have also been some technology advancements and educational opportunities for our customers. This blog is a sampling of some of that collaboration and shows a great example of two companies working together to deliver significant and impactful customer value.

Workshop

I’ll start with the educational opportunities as it is the most time-sensitive. On October 9 at FYUZ, Intel and Wind River will be joined by Dell Technologies to deliver the “Open RAN Tipping Point Workshop.” This will be a two hour “double-click” review of how Open RAN has been deployed. We’ll share lessons learned from our deployed customers and provide some actionable detail about our combined solution. After FYUZ we’ll be taking a version this program on the road and any service provider who is interested should let us know so we can schedule a workshop for you.

Optimization

One of the biggest things we did with Intel this year is to optimize Wind River Studio to run on a single core of 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors with vRAN Boost. We put together a solution brief, aptly titled, “Wind River, Intel Solution Supports More Cloud Native RAN Services with Less Compute” which provides information on the performance gains and footprint reduction from one generation of processors to another with Wind River Studio. The key take-away is the fact that by reducing the CaaS footprint to a single core, it frees up compute power and increases capacity at the cell site. This capacity can be used to increase the number of users served, increase the throughput or data speeds for existing users, reduce hardware cost and power consumption, and allows OEMs/RAN vendors to add new features without needed additional servers or optimizations.

Faster feature delivery and integration time leads to faster time to market

Wind River has a customer first open-source software approach. This means we don’t make our customers wait for community acceptance before delivering a feature. We deliver it to the customer first, then take on the process of upstreaming to the open-source project. This is important as the open-source community may have different priorities than our customer and if our customer needs a feature now, we want to deliver it now. This process, along with a case study, is detailed in this solution brief titled, “Wind River and Intel Accelerate Time to Market for Open RAN Solutions”

Reference Architecture

Putting some of the pieces above into practice, we produced a reference implementation for the 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processor with Intel® vRAN Boost, which includes a selection of Dell PowerEdge XR servers and Wind River Studio Cloud Platform. The Intel-Dell Verified Reference Configuration for Virtualized Radio Access Networks on Wind River Studio simplifies design choices for end users by bundling hardware and software components together, while making high performance more predictable. This saves time, effort, and expense of end users while evaluating hardware and software options. As an Intel Verified Reference Configuration (VRC), the workload described in this solution brief is designed to minimize the challenges of infrastructure deployments and optimization efforts, ensuring best performance for low latency vRAN use cases.

Video: Open RAN rollouts and key takeaways

If video is more your thing, Intel and Wind River share key takeaways from early Open RAN rollout efforts. In this video, Gil Hellmann, VP of solutions engineering at Wind River, and Daniel Lynch, senior marketing director at Intel, take a few minutes with TelecomTV to share what they have learned from early rollouts with customers such as Verizon and Vodafone, and explain how their customers have benefitted from the collaboration between Wind River and Intel in terms of energy efficiency, operational efficiency and total cost of ownership. As the industry matures, trials and early deployments of open radio access networks (Open RAN) and virtual RAN (vRAN) are ramping up around the world, Gil and Dan share some valuable insights on how Intel and Wind River have made these deployments possible.

The Intel and Wind River partnership is a win-win-win. It’s good for our two companies, and even better for our mutual customers. We have more projects in the works which you will hear about soon enough but in the meantime we’d love to hear any feedback you have on the work we’ve done already, and if there’s anything we can do for you.

About the author

Jeff Gowan is a Director for Industry Marketing at Wind River