The Economic Benefits of Dell Telecom Multi-Cloud Foundation

Communication Service Providers (CSPs) are rapidly deploying 5G networks, which have the potential to disrupt the telecom business and create new revenue streams. 5G networks will enable many new services and applications, including connected vehicles, cloud gaming, AR/VR, and massive IoT. Many of these new applications will require high-performance, low-latency edge computing, which requires a transformation of traditional telecom central offices to telco-cloud edge data centers. One of the key drivers of this transformation of central offices to data centers is the migration from a physical radio access network (RAN) to a virtual RAN (vRAN) and/or Open RAN. In previous studies, ACG has shown the financial benefits of migrating to Open RAN1. Over the next five years we expect vRAN, Open RAN, and edge computing to drive the migration of access and aggregation central offices to cloud-enabled data centers.

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CSPs now face major challenges as they transform their networks to interconnected distributed telco-cloud data centers. Telco-cloud networks present challenging Day 0/1/2 life-cycle operations problems that demand automation for scalability and cost-efficient operations. The bare-metal and telco-cloud stack layers both present a complex set of challenges. Dell Technologies released Bare Metal Orchestration in 2021 to orchestrate and automate the bare-metal layer across a distributed network with thousands of edge data centers and hundreds of thousands of servers. Recently, Dell has announced Telecom Multi-Cloud Foundation, which integrates with the leading cloud software platforms from Red Hat®, VMware, and Wind River to deliver a turnkey, hardware/software cloud stack with automated deployment and life-cycle management. It consists of Dell Bare Metal Orchestrator, Bare Metal Orchestrator Modules, and approved Dell hardware.

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Bare Metal Orchestrator Modules encapsulate the continuous integration testing Dell Technologies performs with its partners and combines it with the automation of Bare Metal Orchestrator to reduce labor expenses in many areas:

• Test and certification of new infrastructure, software, and services

• Configuration, fault, performance, and security management

• Engineering and planning

• Software upgrades
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ACG developed a detailed total cost of ownership/return on investment (TCO/ROI) model that shows that the Dell solution results in 39% operations expense savings and an ROI of 211% over five years. This paper provides an overview of the benefits of Telecom Multi-Cloud Foundation and provides the assumptions and results of the ACG TCO/ROI model.