Elisa, Elisa Polystar, and Wind River Achieve New Automation Milestone for Telco Edge Data Centers
Elisa, a leading telecommunications company; Elisa Polystar, a pioneer in autonomous networks; and Wind River®, a global leader in delivering software for mission-critical intelligent systems, have reached a new milestone and achieved the fully automated deployment of cloud infrastructure, cloud-native network functions, and end-to-end monitoring for telco edge data center sites using Wind River® Studio Conductor and the Elisa Polystar Customer Experience Assurance solution.
This significant milestone empowers service providers to further expand their distributed edge deployments to a large scale with economic efficiency and superior network performance. Studio Conductor delivers a single pane of glass to manage and automate deployment in large-scale distributed cloud environments. Elisa Polystar Customer Experience Assurance brings advanced end-to-end visibility, network tracing, and troubleshooting capabilities for a first-class customer experience.
The companies have worked together to show that their jointly developed technology, while utilizing the Studio Conductor automation framework, can significantly reduce deployment time of the entire end-to-end service and operator intervention time. For instance, through an automated process, the time needed for auditing the configuration of the underlying hardware can be reduced by 80%, with human interaction time reduced by 90%. These figures improve as the number of servers grows. Likewise, savings of up to 70–90% can be achieved by automating the network function onboarding process. These represent the real improvements possible when embracing high levels of automation in network operations.
“Elisa is driving state-of-the-art automation of our operations and edge deployments. After successfully automating edge cloud platform deployments, we are now focusing on automating lifecycle management of applications deployed at edge. It is thrilling to achieve new milestones as we grow our collaboration with Wind River to automatically deploy network function workloads on our regional edge cloud data centers,” said Markus Kinnunen, vice president, Cloud Services, Elisa. “By working with Wind River, Elisa can deliver on advanced automation to shrink time to deploy and enhance network quality.”
“Elisa Polystar enables CSPs to achieve self-driving networks. Through the collaboration with Elisa and Wind River, we have demonstrated how our Customer Experience Assurance solution can be seamlessly integrated with automatic lifecycle management of network functions in edge cloud infrastructure,” said Thomas Nilsson, chief product officer at Elisa Polystar. “Our customers can trust that Elisa Polystar AI-powered Data Operations, Automated Assurance, and Automated Operations solutions are ready for dynamic edge networks, continuing to support CSPs in their strategic decision-making and to drive customer experience and automation use cases for operational efficiency.”
“Elisa and Elisa Polystar are industry innovators in automation and digital services. With each new advancement, we look forward to growing our collaboration,” said Paul Miller, chief technology officer, Wind River. “Wind River Studio enables industry-unique, distributed, and edge-aware automation to ease infrastructure management, application deployment, and public cloud integration. Together with Elisa, we continue to help service providers’ complex challenge of deploying and managing a physically distributed, ultra-low-latency cloud-native infrastructure.”
These latest achievements showcase the companies’ commitment to innovation and their setting of a new benchmark in operational excellence. This technology will be demonstrated at Mobile World Congress 2024 at the companies’ respective booths: Wind River (Hall 2, 2F25) and Elisa and Elisa Polystar (Hall 5, booth 5F35).
Elisa was the first to launch a fully automated edge data center into commercial service in Europe. In addition to Studio Conductor, the data center leverages Wind River Studio Cloud Platform, Wind River Studio Analytics, and the 5G core User Plane Function (UPF) application from Elisa’s packet core vendor. Studio provides a fully cloud-native, Kubernetes- and container-based architecture, based on open source, for the development, deployment, operations, and servicing of distributed edge networks at scale. Elisa’s UPF application enables local breakout to regional services, including enterprises that need fast, secure, and low-latency access to their own local data centers. With Studio Conductor, the deployment process becomes fully automated, enabling rapid and efficient provisioning of edge data center resources.