Building the 5G Foundation – Enterprise Private Mobility-as-a-Service

Progressive enterprises are pursuing software-defined solutions with operating models powered by analytics, automation and machine communications to improve productivity, service-levels and cost structures. With hundreds of devices and sensors connecting to a network, wired connections are becoming expensive. At the same time, the mobile networks are not ready for the massive connections and the data associated with these connections coming their way.

Using conventional unlicensed methods such as Wi-Fi to address the coverage and capacity is not necessarily ideal for some mission critical workloads.  This is because:

• Wi-Fi is designed as a “best effort” service, it cannot deliver the Quality of Service (QoS) to the level most large-scale companies demand.
• It requires significant security to be added to the solution – a big concern for healthcare facilities and other mission critical enterprise companies that have the strictest security needs
• Wi-Fi has limited mobility and the build out of the network has significant CAPEX and OPEX costs

Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) will be a key catalyst and enabler for private mobility for two main reasons:

1. Unlike Wi-Fi, it uses a licensed wireless band and LTE technology to enable guaranteed service levels for the enterprise.
2. The Enterprise can choose to deploy CBRS enabled private Mobility-as-a-Service. Many cloud service providers/wireless ISPs are building out a subscription-based model and therefore, the data rate costs are close to zero and the deployment of the service is faster and sometimes less expensive than Wi-Fi.

This is great news since CBRS will increase the adoption of 4G spectrum within the enterprise and paves the way for 5G. Earlier this month, the CBRS Alliance said it had begun work on a new release to merge with the 3GPP specification for 5G deployments.

We are working with Ruckus Networks (now CommScope via acquisition) to enable massive adoption of mobile edge solutions that will be leveraging CBRS bands in 4G today and will become the foundational blocks for 5G within the enterprise. Ruckus Networks has the core components for private mobility on a public cloud infrastructure, which includes the pre-provisioned SIMs, zero-touch provisioning capabilities and self-service tools for the enterprise.    The combined strengths of mobile access by Ruckus Networks and secure customer edge infrastructure by Dell Technologies enables the enterprise transformation plan.

Key Requirements for the Enterprise

While there are many important success factors to be considered for enterprise rollouts, the following key requirements are essential to ensure that while 4G is being deployed today, the principles of 5G and its foundational blocks are taken into consideration.

1. The need is for a faster, more reliable network that has low latency and most importantly, is private (secure) so data is not shared across the public network.  Wi-Fi isn’t always the most secure service, which can be a concern for any business where it is crucial to keep customers information and data private.
2. The network should be designed for capacity, quality of service and guaranteed service levels.
3. The workloads must reside locally within the enterprise and be orchestrated from a managed service cloud data center.
4. Regardless of consumption model (on-prem, cloud, hybrid) – the operations must be seamless across technology platforms, locations and administrative domains.

Private Mobility-as-a-Service is a Key Enabler for the Enterprise

Some of the key values extended by private Mobility as-a-Service utilizing CBRS bands are as follows.

• Enhanced reliability: More reliable than Wi-Fi for business-critical communications, private Mobility-as-a-Service uses CBRS spectrum to guarantee low latency with a managed SLA model.
• Flexible licensing model: This solution is a subscription SaaS model where the service orchestration, subscriber provisioning, and dynamic spectrum allocation for the access points are all pre-built into the solution for the enterprise.
• Ubiquity: Given the architectural overlap between SD-WAN and private Mobility as-a-Service, the solution can coexist with the broad SD-WAN deployments.

Drive Your Business Today and Innovate for Tomorrow Using the PowerEdge Server Platform

Who says you can’t have your cake and eat it too?

We all know the key ingredients, flour, oil and sugar, in the right proportion, make a great cake. Similarly, automation, security and scalability are the building blocks of the server infrastructure. This foundation enables you to get the best results for your core business applications and prepares you to take on more demanding, complex workloads. Dell EMC PowerEdge servers help you develop the perfect recipe for success, so you can drive business today while you prepare for tomorrow’s new applications and business models.

From deployments to firmware updates to risk prevention, Dell EMC OpenManage offers intelligent automation that saves time, reduces human error and ultimately, helps provide the best customer experience. One way to think about this is if your data center already offers optimal performance and uptime, then you will have less routine tasks to manage and can spend more time on business-critical activities. Automated tools within OpenManage make it a “piece of cake” to take on new and complex workloads, integrate new technologies and rapidly deploy new servers. Plus, all your servers can be simply managed by OpenManage Enterprise within a single console or from anywhere on your mobile device.

Security continues to remain a top concern for IT professionals. Data breaches are akin to leaving a cake out in the rain. And it is hard to focus on new initiatives when you are working to resolve past issues. PowerEdge servers are built on a Cyber-Resilient Architecture and are conformant to NIST SP 800-193 standards – the most robust security guidelines in the world. Security begins at design and procurement and spans the entire lifecycle of your server to help protect your business. This security is further fortified with Dell EMC’s supply chain assurance, providing peace of mind for customers.

Scalability becomes essential as data continues to grow in importance and volume. If all of a sudden, demand increases to 10x as many cakes as you normally make, you want to ensure you have the right equipment that can scale and adapt to this increased demand. The same holds true for your data center. PowerEdge servers are built on a scalable architecture, so you can quickly add or swap resources like internal storage, memory or processors. Our refresh includes the new 2nd Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors[1],  which offer up to 40% performance increase[2] on core business applications and to help set the foundation for you to add new features designed for data-centric workloads.

The icing on the cake is the addition of new Intel® Optane™ DC persistent memory¹, which allows you to drive faster results for large, complex data sets with up to 2.5x more memory capacity for select PowerEdge servers.[3] In fact, PowerEdge R740xd enables up to 2.7x  transactions per second with Intel Optane DC persistent memory compared to NVMe drives in a virtualized Microsoft SQL Server 2019 preview environment.[4] And we made it as easy as a cake mix to configure and update Intel Optane DC persistent memory with iDRAC out-of-band management.

If you need to run complex AI workloads, Intel® Deep Learning Boost offers inferencing capabilities right within the CPU. And for the sprinkles on top? PowerEdge offers BIOS tuning with workload-optimized server configuration profiles, so you can configure optimal performance outcomes as you add new technologies, workloads or servers.

How do YOU decide to make your cake? From scratch, buy a cake mix or get it pre-made from your favorite bakery? You can have the cake any way you want it and eat it as well. It is easy to accelerate innovation in your data center with Dell EMC–  just choose your favorite flavor. Dell EMC PowerEdge technology at any level of integration – from a best-in-breed platform, to a pre-integrated turnkey hybrid cloud implementation or any step in-between. Make sure you check out Dell EMC Ready Solutions for HPC that come in multiple flavors to help you accelerate parallel workloads including AI, machine and deep learning from Life Sciences to Digital Manufacturing.