Solving 5G Edge Cloud Problems With More Features, 25% of the Cost

By Jeff Gowan

I’ve had the opportunity to bring a few different products to market with companies that I’ve worked with. I know that unless a product is the first solve a  problem, or works twice as well as a competing solution, or costs ½ as much, its going to be a tough sell. I’ve been very fortunate to work with Wind River on bringing a solution to market that ticks all of those boxes, and then some. But you don't have to just take my word for it.

Verizon recently worked with Wind River Studio for their 5G far edge deployments. You can be assured that’s a decision that came with a lot of validation, but the details won’t be public anytime soon.

Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) recently completed an economic validation of Wind River Studio which included quantitative and qualitative analysis to determine the cost-effectiveness, operational efficiency, and ability to deliver innovation for 5G deployments. The validation focused on economic benefits of using the Wind River solution vs. legacy telco systems and competitors who are getting into the market via enterprise network solutions. To get the highlights of from the report you can watch a conversation with ESG and Wind River, or you can download the full report to get the detailed analysis.

Years ago we designed the cloud platform capabilities in Wind River Studio to be the best in solution on the market. Then, after evolving the open-source based solution over the years, honing it to be an ideal fit for operators of mission critical far-edge clouds, we’ve recently enhanced it with a full set of integrated analytics and orchestration capabilities. At this point, if you are responsible for planning, building, or operating an intelligent edge cloud network such as 5G vRAN, it would be foolish to not evaluate Wind River Studio – and that’s not just our opinion. Verizon and ESG did the analysis to quantify.

One of the standout findings of the assessment was the fact that Wind River Studio is able to support edge sites with a capital cost reduction of 67%-75% at each site depending the workload needs of the site. The analysis modeled the expected cost to procure hardware, software, applications, and maintenance contracts over a three-year timeframe along with the relative efficiency of the Wind River solution vs. competing solutions.

Other findings highlighted significantly lower latency between the radio unit (RU) and distributed unit (DU) which ultimately translates into greater reach using the Wind River solution. This means an operator would be able to support more towers per data center, requiring fewer data centers, saving potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars per data center.

The report also discusses the upside of having greater numbers of cores available to run applications, lower power consumption, and additional storage capacity in addition to operational benefits of centralized management and zero-touch provisioning.

While this report focuses on a telco 5G use case, the efficiencies and savings gained translate to other use cases such as an industrial manufacturing edge network, or even a tactical cloud, which has been getting a lot of attention from the military.

To get the detailed analysis you can download the report, “Analyzing the Economic Benefits of Wind River Studio for 5G Deployments.” You can also watch the highlight video here