Red Hat announced that it’s open hybrid cloud technologies are providing a horizontal cloud platform for Orange Egypt’s virtual network functions (VNFs), helping the service provider to more quickly deliver new services to customers, optimize its network investments and reduce operational expenditure.
Building on the foundation of Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Ceph Storage, Orange Egypt is the first Orange affiliate to manage 100% of its live customer traffic over a fully software-based platform spanning several sites across its region.
In less than a year, Orange Egypt launched vEPC in 12 datacenters across six sites in Cairo and Alexandria. Today, 100% of Orange Egypt’s mobile broadband traffic is served by its virtualized packet core platform.
To maintain its position as Egypt’s leading mobile operator, Orange Egypt wanted to use the latest in hybrid cloud and network functions virtualization (NFV) innovation to be able to respond in real-time to market dynamics and network conditions to best serve its more than 30 million customers. As part of this initiative, Orange Egypt looked to virtualize its mobile packet core, which had been running standalone functions on dedicated appliances.
Accordingly, Orange Egypt set out to move strategically from a centralized evolved packet core (EPC) supplier to a software-defined, distributed architecture on standard hardware, using Red Hat OpenStack Platform supported by Red Hat Ceph Storage. Red Hat Consulting provided certified training courses and professional services to support Orange Egypt’s teams derive greater value from open technologies, tools and methodologies.
With its Red Hat-based open cloud, Orange Egypt gains access to an ecosystem of thousands of certified providers. The freedom to choose diverse suppliers as well as a reduced reliance on specialized hardware has helped Orange Egypt to lower its capital expenditure and operational expenses.
Red Hat OpenStack Platform is massively-scalable infrastructure with unified automated management, enabling Orange Egypt to launch and adapt services to better fulfil customer demand. With Red Hat Ceph Storage, Orange Egypt has a massively scalable storage solution for its workloads. It has been able to roll out software-defined capacity expansions for its telecom packet core to serve summer hotspots in Alexandria and Northern coastal areas. Orange Egypt was able to make 50% capacity upgrades in only two working days per site, which is nearly 10 times quicker than its traditional process.
With this new deployment, Orange Egypt was also able to deliver new cybersecurity services such as parental controls and malware protection to its consumer and business customers faster than previously possible with its traditional system. The third VNF that Orange Egypt has launched on its platform is mobile data optimization (MDO), enabling transmission control protocol (TCP) acceleration aimed at reducing network latency and improving the user experience.
