SUSE®, the developer of SUSE Linux Enterprise, Rancher, and NeuVector, supports telecommunications operators in building new applications at the edge using open source.

On the 15th, SUSE® announced its latest flagship version, 'SUSE Adaptive Telco Infrastructure Platform (ATIP) 3.0,' which helps customers accelerate product launch times and prepare for future-proof networks.

This is based on SUSE's extensive experience working with telecommunications operators as a key supplier to Tier 1 network equipment providers (NEPs) such as Ericsson and Huawei.

SUSE ATIP 3.0, specifically designed for communications, sets a new standard for large-scale, easy GitOps-enabled operations by providing new high-value capabilities to the platform through simpler and more flexible zero-touch deployment and management.

It also guarantees consistent quality for Telco-grade hardware, Telco configurations, and workloads.

Thomas Di Giacomo, Chief Technology and Product Officer at SUSE, stated, “Amidst strong currents of change within the telecommunications market “Customer response to SUSE ATIP as an adaptive platform for telecommunications operators has been favorable,” he said, adding that “it is being adopted for a wide range of uses across mobile and fixed networks, including 5G packet cores, cloud radio access networks (RAN), and fiber-to-the-home/broad (FTTH).”

SUSE ATIP 3.0 is the first commercially available telco cloud stack jointly developed by the five major European telecommunications companies—Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telecom Italia, Telefonica, and Vodafone—along with Ericsson and Nokia, in active cooperation with Project Sylva of the Linux Foundation Europe, which was established to develop a reference cloud software framework.

Stephane Demartis, Vice President of Telco Cloud Infrastructure at Orange, said, “Project Silva addresses the urgent need to secure more commonality across the open-source telco cloud stack. This is because the entire ecosystem is currently slowing down due to the diversity of technologies between stacks,” adding, “SUSE is a key contributor and backer of this project. With the availability of SUSE ATIP as a commercially available support product, it has become much easier to integrate Silva into our own internal horizontal telco cloud stack, ‘Orange Telco Cloud,’ deployed across our EMEA affiliates.”

Telecommunications operators can perform the following through SUSE ATIP 3.0.

Through communication-grade Kubernetes clusters, the deployment of cloud-native network functions (CNF), such as 5G packet core and cloud RAN, can be achieved at scale. SUSE ATIP 3.0 provides automated zero-touch deployment and lifecycle management capabilities for Kubernetes clusters and underlying bare metal or private cloud infrastructure.

Through the vendor-neutral integration points of SUSE ATIP, which are widely adopted based on the CNCF Cluster API, operators can protect integration investments, keep operating costs low, and maintain a flexible platform strategy. By adopting the Cluster API, telecommunications operators can realize tremendous value through separation while avoiding the hidden lock-in effects commonly found in other solutions on the market.

Energy efficiency can be increased by utilizing hardware more efficiently with smaller footprint components optimized for the communications edge. SUSE is a key member of the Linux Foundation Europe project Silva and is making significant contributions to the open source community creating an open framework for net-zero networks through the monitoring and optimization of total carbon emissions.

It integrates with Kubevert to run virtual machines alongside containers. As containers and Kubernetes are widely accepted as the future of Network Function Virtualization (NFV), it provides a consistent Kubernetes-native orchestration approach that enables telecommunications operators to modernize their existing virtual machine-centric telco cloud infrastructure to run containers.

In the Open RAN sector, we have entered into a partnership with Parallel Wireless, a leading provider of platform-agnostic Open RAN solutions. This collaboration aims to integrate ATIP into our ecosystem to implement the world's first fully hardware-agnostic ORAN stack. This enables flexible data management, data optimization, and secure processing through Parallel Wireless’s energy-efficient GreenRAN™ solution, while significantly reducing the service provider’s total cost of ownership.

SUSE ATIP has been verified to run on Intel® FlexRAN™ on 4th generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors.

SUSE ATIP 3.0 is scheduled for official release in April 2024. If you would like to meet with a SUSE expert at the Mobile World Congress, please visit booth 5K6 in Hall 5. More information can be found at https://www.SUSE.com/sector/telco/.