 theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. Welcome back to Spain, everybody. We're here at the FIERA live at MWC23. You're watching theCUBE's continuous coverage. This is day two. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host Dave Nicholson. Lisa Martin is also in the house. John Furrier, out of our Palo Alto studio, covering all the news. Check out siliconangle.com. Okay, we're going to dig into the core infrastructure here. We're going to talk a little bit about servers. Mania Rustogi is here. She's in technical marketing at Dell Technologies. And Abdel Begegni is technical program manager at the Telecom Infra project. Folks, welcome to theCUBE. Good to see you. Thank you. Abdel, what is the Telecom Infra project? Explain to our audience. Yeah, so the Telecom Infra project is a U.S.-based non-profit organization, a community that brings together different participants, suppliers, vendors, operators, SIs together, to accelerate the adoption of open-ran and open-interface solutions across the globe. Okay, so that's the mission, is open-ran adoption. And then, when was it formed? Give us the background and some of the milestones so far. So the Telecom Infra project was established five years ago from different vendor leaders and operators across the globe. And then, the mission was to bring different players to work together to accelerate the adoption of open-ran. Now, open-ran has a lot of potential and opportunities, but at the same time, there's challenges that we work together as a community to facilitate those challenges and overcome those barriers. And we've been covering all week just the disaggregation of the network. And we've seen this movie sort of before, playing out now in Telecom. And Manya, this is obviously a compute-intensive environment. We were at the Dell booth earlier this morning, poking around, beautiful booth, lots of servers. Tell us what your angle is here in this marketplace. Yeah, so I would just like to say that Dell is kind of leading or accelerating the innovation at the Telecom Edge with all these ruggedized servers that we are offering. So, just continuing the mission, like Abdul just mentioned for the open-ran, that's where a lot of focus will be from these servers will be. So XR8000, it's going to be one of the star servers for Telecom with offering various workloads. So it can be V-ran, open-ran, multi-axis edge compute. And it has all these different features with itself. And if we can talk more about the performance gains, how it is based on the Intel CPUs, and just try to solve the purpose, like along with various vendors, the whole ecosystem, solve this challenge for the open-ran. So Manya mentioned some of those infrastructure parts. Does, and do you say TIP or TIP for short? We say TIP, TIP is fine as well. Does TIP or TIP have a certification process or a set of guidelines that someone like Dell would either adhere to or follow to be sort of TIP certified? What does that look like? Yeah, of course. So what TIP does is TIP accredits what solutions that actually work in a real commercial-grade environment. So what we do is we bring the different players together to come up with the most efficient, optimized solution. And then it goes through a process that the community sets the criteria for and accepts. And then once this is accredited, it goes into TIP exchange for other operators and the participants and the industry to adopt. So it's a well-structured process and it's everything about how we orchestrate the industry to come together and set those requirements and guidelines. Everything starts with a use case from the beginning. It's based on operators' requirements, use cases, and then those use cases will be translated into a solution that the industry will approve. So when you say operator, I could think of that sort of traditionally as the customer side of things versus the vendor side of things. Typically when organizations get together like TIP, the operator customer side is seeking a couple of things. They want perfect substitutes in all categories so that they could grind vendors down from a price perspective. But they also want amazing innovation. How do you deliver both? Yeah, I mean that's an excellent question. We be pragmatic and we bring all players in one table to discuss. MNOs want this, vendors can provide a certain level and we bring them together and they discuss and come up with something that can be deployed today and future proof for the future. So I've been an enterprise technology observer for a long time and I saw the attempt to take network function virtualization which never really made much of an impact. But it was the beginning of the enterprise players really getting into this market. And then I would see companies, whether it was Dell or HPE or Cisco, they take an x86 server, put a cool name on it, edge something and throw it over the fence and that didn't work so well. Now it's like, Mania, we're starting to get serious. You're building relationships. I mentioned we were at the Dell booth. You're actually building purpose, built systems now for this segment. Tell us what's different about this market and the products that you're developing for this market than say the commercial enterprise. So you're absolutely right. Like you know, kind of thinking about the journey there has been a lot of, it has been going for a long time for all these improvements and towards going more open, disaggregated and overall that kind of environment. And what Dell brings together with our various partners particularly if you talk about Intel. So these servers are powered by the latest 4GEN Intel Xeon processors. And so what Intel is doing right now is providing us with great accelerators like Vran Boost. So it increases performance, like doubles what it was able to do before. And power efficiency, it has been an issue for a long, long time and it still continues but there is some improvement. For example, 20% reduction overall with the power saving. So that's a step forward in that direction. And then we have done some of our own testing as well with these servers and continuing that it's not just telecom but also going towards edge or inferencing. Like all these comes together, not just XR8000 but for example XR5610, 7620. So these are three servers which combines together to form telecom and edge and covers all together. So that's where it is. Great, thank you. So I mean I think generally people agree that in the fullness of time all radio access networks are going to be open. It's just a matter of okay, how do we get there? How do we make sure that it has the same quality of service characteristics? So where are we on that journey from your perspective and maybe you could project what it's going to look like over this decade because it's going to take years. It's going to take a bit of time to mature and be a kind of a plug and play different units together. I think there was a bit of over promising in the last few years on the acceleration of open run deployment that what a tip is trying to do is trying to realize the pragmatic approach of the open run deployment. Now we know the innovation cannot happen when you have a kind of closed interfaces. When you allow small players to be within the market and bring the value to the run areas, this is where the innovation happens. I think what would happen on the run side of things is that it would be driven by use cases and the operators. And the minute that the operators are no longer can depend on the closed interface vendors because there's use cases that fulfill, that are requires some open run functionality be the RIC or the SMO layers and the different configurations of the R use, getting the servers to the do you side of things. This kind of modular scalability on this layer is when the open run would boost. And this would happen probably, yeah. Go ahead. Yeah, it would happen in the next few years, not next year or the year after, but definitely something within four to five years from now. I mean it does feel like it's a second half of the decade and you feel like the ran intelligent controller is going to be a catalyst to actually sort of force the world into this open environment. Let's say that the RIC and the promises that were given to the SON 10 years ago, the RIC is realizing it and the closed run vendors are developing a lot on the RIC side more than the other parts of the open run. So it will be a catalyst that would drive the innovation of open run, but only time will tell. And there are some naysayers. I mean I've seen some, you know, very few, but I've seen some works that, oh, the economics aren't there, it'll never get there. What do you say to that, that it won't ever, open run won't ever be as cost effective as closed networks? Open run will open innovations. That small players would have the opportunity to contribute to the run space. This opportunity is not given to small players today. Open run provides this kind of opportunity and giving that it's a path for innovation, then I would say that, you know, different perspectives. Some people are making sure that, you know, the status quo is the way forward, but it would certainly put barriers on innovation and this is not the way forward. Yeah, you can't protect the past and the future. My own personal opinion is that it doesn't have to be comparable from a TCO perspective. It could be close enough. It's the same thing with, like you watch the adoption of cloud. Like cloud was more expensive. It was always more expensive to rent, but people seem to be doing public cloud, because of the innovation capabilities and the developer capabilities. Is that a fair analogy in this space, do you think? I mean, this is what all technologies happens, right? It starts with a quite costly and then the cost will start dropping down. I mean, the cost of a megabyte two decades ago is probably higher than what it costs you with a terabyte. So this is how technology evolves. It's any kind of comparison, either copper or even the old generation, the legacy generations, could be a valid comparison. However, they need to be at a market demand for something like that. And I think the use cases today with what the industry is looking for have that kind of opportunity to pull this kind of demand. But again, it needs to go work close by what happens in the technology space, be it, you know, we always talk about when we used to talk about 5G, there was a lot of hypes going on there. But I think once it realizes in a pragmatic, in a real life situation, the minutes that governments decide to go for autonomous vehicles, then you would have limitations on the current closed-run infrastructures and you would definitely need something to top it up. I mean, 5G needs open-ran. I mean, that's not going to happen without it. Yeah, but what would you say the most significant friction is between here and the open-ran nirvana? What are the real hurdles that need to be overcome? There's obviously just the, I don't want to change, we've been doing this the same way forever. But what are the real, the legitimate concerns that people have when we start talking about open-ran? So I think from a technology perspective, it will be solved. All of the, I mean, there's smart engineers in the world today that will fix these kind of problems and all of the interoperability issues and all of that. I think it's about the mindset. The interfaces between the legacy core and the run has become more fluid today. We don't have that kind of a hard line between these kind of different aspects. We have the mech coming closer to the run. We have the run coming closer to the core and we have the service-based architectures in the core. So these kind of things make, it needs a paradigm shift between how operators would need to tackle the open-ran space. Are there specific deployment requirements for open-ran that you can speak to from your perspective? For sure. And going in this direction, like, you know, evolution with the technology and how different players are coming together. Like, that's something I wanted to comment from the previous question. And that's where like, you know, these servers that Dell is offering right now, specific functionality requirements, for example, it's a small server. It's short depth, just 430 millimeters of depth and it can fit anywhere. So things like small form factor, it's crucial because if you, it can replace like multiple servers 10 years ago with just one server. And you can place it like near a baseband unit or to a cell side on top of a roof, wherever like, you know, if it's a small company and you need this kind of 5G connection, it kind of solves that challenge with this server. And then there are various things like, you know, increasing thermals, for example, temperatures. It is classified like, you know, a kind of compliant with the negative 555 degree Celsius. And then we are also moving towards, for example, negative 20 to 65 degree Celsius, which is kind of great because in situations where, which are out of our hands and you need specific thermals for those situations, that's where it can solve that problem. Are those statistics, in those measurements, different than the old Neb standards, network equipment building standards, or are they in line with that? It is a next step. Like, so most of our servers that we have right now are negative 55 degree Celsius for especially the extremely rugged server series. And this one, XR8000, which is focused for the, it's telecom inspired, so it's focused on those customers. So we are trying to come up, like, go a step ahead and also, like, offering this additional temperatures testing and, yeah, compliance. So it is. Awesome, so, I said we were at the booth earlier today, it looks like some good traffic, people poking around, the different, you know, innovations you got going, some of the private network stuff is kind of cool. I'm like, how much does that cost? I think I might like one of those, you know. Private 5G home network. Yeah, why not? Guys, great to have you on the show. Thanks so much for sharing. Appreciate it. Thank you so much. Okay, for Dave Nicholson and Lisa Martin, this is Dave Vellante, the Cube's coverage of MWC23 Live from DeFita in Barcelona. We'll be right back.