Mirantis Telco Cloud includes specific deployment profiles for telecommunications use cases, such as network functions virtualization (NFV) and edge computing. For edge computing, Mirantis Telco Cloud helps overcome specific compute and storage challenges, and provides deployment profiles for core and edge data centers and edge devices.
After Inmarsat awarded Mirantis the contract, the next step was an Architecture Design Assessment. The Architecture Design Assessment showed that Mirantis understood Inmarsat’s objectives. The Mirantis team was very responsive and answered impromptu questions as needed, with direct communications channels to the appropriate Mirantis teams.
After the assessment, Mirantis OpenStack for Kubernetes was deployed into Inmarsat’s development environment, and the work of onboarding various telco workloads ensued. The workloads included data plane intensive applications – among these include virtual routers, packet core, firewalls and deep packet inspection.
Preliminary Results
Although Inmarsat is still in the stages of onboarding applications, it has experienced positive results already in terms of cloud agility, density, performance and reliability. Thanks to the new Mirantis OpenStack for Kubernetes platform, Inmarsat was able to perform upgrades to the Telco Cloud infrastructure software without negatively impacting active NFV workloads.
The company will roll out all of the anticipated telco clouds to cover all of its centralized data centers globally by the end of 2022.
Unifying Diverse Satellite Communications
As Inmarsat prepares to launch its groundbreaking ORCHESTRA communications network, Mirantis Telco Cloud will assist the company to provide one overarching platform to unify a vast portfolio of services for maritime, aviation, government and enterprise. These include in-flight services and air traffic management for commercial airlines, vessel monitoring for fishing fleets, remote management of oil drills, real-time defense communications, and many more.
With ORCHESTRA, all of Inmarsat’s GEO, LEO and terrestrial 5G services will be anchored to data centers running Mirantis Telco Cloud. The idea is to share a lot of the virtualized network services across all offerings so that a customer has the same look and feel and experience, no matter which service, or groups of services, is providing the ubiquitous connectivity.