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Orange S.A. ORANY recently announced a collaboration with Red Hat, a provider of open-source solutions. This partnership will integrate containerized and virtual network functions using Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.
Having embarked on its international network transformation journey eight years ago, Orange adopted a network softwarization strategy to virtualize network functions. This approach aims to enhance flexibility, cost efficiency and control over its network and service deployments. Orange successfully virtualized more than 30 telecom functions from 12 different vendors, including SD-WAN, voice, content delivery networks (CDN) and roaming. Establishing a telco cloud infrastructure was a key element of this strategy, ensuring a widespread footprint that delivers latency of under 10 milliseconds for any business-to-business (B2B) or wholesale customer.
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To further accelerate its transition to cloud-native services, Orange has selected Red Hat platforms as the foundation for its infrastructure. Red Hat OpenShift will serve as the core for cloud-native network functions, while OpenShift Virtualization will enhance Orange’s existing expertise in virtualized workloads. Additionally, the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform will enable fully automated deployment and scaling across Orange’s global network. Through this partnership, Orange is implementing a vendor-agnostic cloud-native and automation framework that strengthens its network services softwarization and industrialization.
What Does This Collaboration Offer?
Orange's new platform will support a range of use cases, including SD-WAN, SASE gateway, IMS, 4G and 5G core, Internet of Things (IoT) and roaming services. So far, six new points of presence (PoPs) have been successfully deployed.
Through its collaboration with Red Hat, Orange enhances agility, enabling faster responses to customer needs and market shifts. Key benefits of the platform include greater availability with improved lifecycle management and near-zero downtime, enhanced flexibility with seamless support for virtualized and containerized workloads, and accelerated time-to-market through automation and zero-touch provisioning, reducing human error and deployment time by four times.
Additionally, the platform boosts resilience with infrastructure as code (IaC), strengthens security through network and container isolation, and lowers carbon footprint with optimized hardware.
Orange plans to expand its telco cloud infrastructure to 75 PoPs globally within two years, transitioning from 50 OpenStack platforms and adding 25 new PoPs. By reusing existing equipment and leveraging Red Hat OpenShift’s power monitoring, Orange aims to meet sustainability goals while improving efficiency.