• The open source-based intelligent edge is getting some attention 
• Red Hat has done a deal with VIL for ‘universal cloud’ facilities, another with NVIDIA
• And IBM has one division that’s showing some impressive growth

Red Hat claims it’s getting traction amongst telcos keen to go open source for their 5G deployments, and attention from other vendors keen to form alliances to the same end. 

It’s just extended its relationship with NVIDEA to provide the hardware and IN side of an ‘intelligent edge’ offering for telcos. 

And it has announced a deal with India’s huge national telco, Vodafone Idea Limited (VIL), which says it will adopt Red Hat’s OpenStack Platform, Red Hat Ceph Storage, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

The VIL strategy is to upgrade the technology in its 100 plus distributed network data centers to open standards and open interfaces to serve as ‘Universal Cloud’ facilities for both its own telco requirements and third party workloads.

The telco says it will deploy Red Hat OpenStack Platform ‘pods’ which can be geographically distributed and taken closer to the end- users, helping to reduce latency and enable an optimal user experience. With Red Hat’s open APIs, VIL will be able to deliver actionable insights to its enterprise users, and help them potentially create a competitive advantage, it claims.

High performance GPU infrastructure

Meanwhile NVIDIA and Red Hat are getting together too. "The industry is ramping 5G and the ‘smart everything’ revolution is beginning. In time, trillions of sensors and devices will be sprinkled all over the world to enable new applications and services," said NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang at the announcement. "We’re working with Red Hat to build a cloud-native, massively scalable, high-performance GPU computing infrastructure for this new 5G world. Powered by the NVIDIA EGX edge computing platform, a new wave of applications will emerge, just as with the smartphone revolution."

Huang says the critical elements in the deployment are NVIDIA’s EGx edge platform and of course Red Hat’s OpenStack platform. He says the combination will enable 5G providers to move from purpose-built ASICs to cloud-native infrastructure. NVIDIA’s Aerial software developer kit - also just announced -  will allow providers to build and deliver high-performance, software-defined 5G wireless RAN by delivering two essential advancements - a low-latency data path directly from Mellanox network interface cards to GPU memory, and a 5G physical layer signal-processing engine that keeps all data within the GPU’s high-performance memory. 

Essentially the combination of general-purpose but powerful silicon infrastructure powered by highly configurable cloud software will create a huge advantage at the edge for telcos. That's the message.

Meanwhile: Red Hat has been credited as pretty-much the only growth story in the IBM stable with the publication of Big Blue’s third quarter results. That showed Red Hat, recently purchased by IBM for $34 billion, had enjoyed a 20 per cent revenue boost while most of the rest of IBMs divisions ran flat.