This reference implementation can help increase hybrid-multicloud, SDN, and CNF adoption, letting enterprises and CoSPs quickly release new services with efficiency and scalability.

Advantages:

• Spend less time, effort, and expense evaluating hardware and software options.
• Simplify design choices and deploy quickly by bundling validated frmware, hardware, and software in a prescriptive, tested configuration that lowers risk and guesswork.
• Innovate on a verified reference configuration, thereby accelerating time to deployment.
• Achieve deterministic performance for telecommunications, enterprise, and hybrid-multicloud workloads, to meet use case SLAs. 

Characteristics:

• Includes Intel® architecture-optimized AI libraries and tools for developers along with validated, bundled containers for ease of DevOps deployment.
• Helps enterprises modernize their data centers and start taking advantage of containers while lowering total costs.
• Is available in Base and Plus configurations, which are customizable and fully interoperable with existing infrastructure.

Organizations need high performance from their workloads to remain competitive Intel and Red Hat co-developed this Intel Reference Implementation for Cloud-Native Hybrid-Multicloud and Software-Defined Networking (SDN)/Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), built using Red Hat OpenShift* Container Platform 4.4. This release introduces key features that enable enterprise IT and communications service providers (CoSPs) to deploy performant and low-latency container-based workloads onto different footprints. Those footprints could be bare metal, virtual, private cloud, public cloud, or a combination of these, in either a centralized data center or on the edge of the network.

In particular, Red Hat OpenShift* Container Platform 4.4 addresses challenges that CoSPs face when they are deploying and scaling networking workloads. Examples of these workloads include IPsec Gateways, VPNs, 5G UPF, 5G EPC, CMTS, BNGs, and CDNs. This reference implementation can assist with improving network services performance, resource management, telemetry, and OSS/BSS— thus making it a preferred container platform for running demanding telecommunications applications.

To address telecommunications use cases, the requirement for deterministic network services performance is key to help ensure that services like 911 calls don’t get dropped. This reference implementation includes Intel® processors and Intel® Ethernet Network Adapters with Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) to achieve high-performance networking. Other Intel® technologies include Intel® Optane™ persistent memory; NVMe-based Intel® Solid State Drives (SSDs) for storage; and Intel® QuickAssist Technology (Intel® QAT) for public key exchange, bulk encryption/decryption, and compression and decompression acceleration.