Red Hat announced it is collaborating with Orange to build a modern infrastructure for an agile, responsive network aimed at bringing innovations to customers more quickly and scaling out services dynamically. They are collaborating in open source community projects to accelerate technology innovation in network virtualization, while Orange is using Red Hat OpenStack Platform for its network functions virtualization infrastructure (NFVi) deployments.

Darrell Jordan-Smith, Vice President, Global Information and Communications Technology, Red Hat said, “Orange is embracing a role as a modern open communications provider, not only by deploying a fully open technology platform with Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Ceph Storage but also by adding its expertise to community development efforts. We’re very pleased that our technologies power Orange’s standardized NFVi platform and we’re excited to continue our collaboration in open source initiatives, aimed at delivering new business value to the industry.”

Orange is collaborating with Red Hat as part of a joint engineering program to deliver additional features supporting NFV into OpenStack and other open source communities. The intent of the program is to better address the specific needs of communications service providers and their networks when developing technologies. This community collaboration recently led to the integration of the OpenStack BGP VPN project and its reference implementation (BaGPipe), with Orange as a lead contributor. This BGP VPN project aims at letting telecom operators mutually interconnect Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) or NFV datacenters and businesses, using industry-standard routing technologies.

Orange is embracing NFV as part of its network transformation strategy, aiming to benefit from greater agility that can be enabled by decoupling its software layer from the hardware stack. To do so, Orange is using Red Hat OpenStack Platform, for its multinational NFV deployment of massively-scalable and agile cloud IaaS, enabling better integration of virtual network functions (VNFs) from a range of vendors.

Christian Gacon, vice president, Wireline Networks and Infrastructure, Orange said, “We are keen to spearhead development for technology platforms that can power our future networks, like OpenStack, and are teaming closely with Red Hat to drive innovation in open communities to help shape them in line with real-world requirements. Red Hat, as an open source solutions leader, is then able to seek to bring that innovation to production-ready fruition in its Red Hat OpenStack Platform. Our joint work on the BGP VPN project is a great example of an important piece of networking technology that we are enhancing for modern communications, as the industry strives towards more dynamic, agile and self-adaptive networks. As we work on an industrial roll out of NFVi, we are confident that standardizing on open source can bring interoperability to the ecosystem for large, scalable cloud environments. We recognize Red Hat as a valuable partner to enable us to onboard VNFs from a variety of different vendors.”