 Oh, yeah. I love the lights. All right. Can you hear me now? Good. Perfect. The lights are a bit bright, but good morning and welcome to the Red Hat breakout sessions. And we're starting it off today. I'm Ian Hood. I'm the Chief Technologist for our global service fighters across all over the world. And in a bit, after I've said a few words, I'm going to have Hanon Garcia join me, my colleague from Red Hat, our Taco Solutions Manager. And so we're here to talk about getting ready for the edge and virtualizing your central office. And strange enough, I was actually in a building here in Berlin yesterday, Deutsche Telekom's building, which actually was the original central office that they have. And it's a whole lot different today than it was when they started many, many years ago. So with that, I'm just going to get things rolling and kind of see where we get ourselves here. I just got that one. Just make it simple. So kind of the key here is what's going on, and we all see it around us, is all of our telco customers are really having to transform themselves, really their entire business. And that was the subject of much discussion yesterday, while they're being disrupted. They're really being changed quite heavily. So what's been going on, and I think people may have seen this at a recent Linux Foundation event, that the infrastructure that we have today. We want to try and build it in a software-defined kind of mode. And if we kind of look to the past, we had virtual network functions, and it sat on top of OpenStack or VMware, and that sat on top of Bare Metal. And fairly recently, the own app orchestrator came along to help us out, and you could also potentially put your workloads onto Azure Rackspace. And where we are kind of right now is people are starting to build some of their network functions in a containerized mode. So now we're going to actually work kind of side-by-side, OpenStack and Kubernetes, and then be able to push that down onto Bare Metal or any cloud. Now the direction we all kind of want to get to, because of the life-cycle management, and you may have heard the keynote this morning from the AT&T folks, that they want to be able to actually do full life-cycle management of containerized functions, virtual functions, have some way to actually run that on top of Kubernetes and then use Bare Metal and push it to any cloud. So that's kind of where the future is in this world we're looking at today. And so speaking of all those things, so where are we spending our time, right? There's really a lot of collaboration going on, and pretty much almost all the innovation that's going on is either started in an open-source community, or is actually that's where a lot of the work is done. And it's all the way from the bottom of the stack, whether it's the hardware pieces at TIP, Open Compute, been a lot of work going on over the course of time in the cloud. OpenStack's been around, I guess we're working on about six years right now. Now we've brought in an SDN with Open Daylight, lots of fast-forwarding things, storage, Kubernetes is relatively new to the party. And a fairly recent one, and that's what kind of drives some of the conversation we're going to have today, is the Acrono Edge Stack. So how do we move this architecture from a centralized thing to the edge of the architecture? Lots of effort in the land of how do I actually automate, do life-cycle management, so that's where the on-app project comes in, Ansible from Red Hat, the ActiveMQ for the bus, and Airship that the folks from AT&T are pushing quite strongly, but the real place that a lot of the work gets done is at the top of this, because it's great to have all these little projects, but if I don't actually integrate them together, that's where Open FE comes in, where a lot of the work we're going to talk about is being done to put things together and actually drive all these pieces to build a service, because the end game is actually to get new services out quicker. That's really kind of the key. So one of the things that Red Hat's come up with is, if you really want to actually deliver these services, and actually deliver them, and whether it's the new 5G ones, the network edge we're going to talk about today, existing mobile services, IoT, analytics, and of course, we can't forget about artificial intelligence, machine learning, and there are some very interesting use cases for blockchain, both in enterprise and in telco. So kind of the way we look at it is that most people are kind of very much focused when you talk to a telco. Almost all the work they do is kind of what I call from the basement. It's where the network is. They start down with the hardware, and they start working their way up the stack. But the other half of their business are the guys that actually run the business, and that's the application side. That's kind of the IT applications like any business. But most other businesses, whether it's financial, whether it's car manufacturers, whatever, they have a lot of data that they use to actually run their business. That's why there's actually a third platform, whether it's a data platform, data management platform, that they use to actually run their business. And actually, as we all know, you know, today's oil, if you will, is data, right? That's really where the money is. So we actually have to build a architecture and framework that connects these three platforms together. And so I've simplified the picture. You know, it's way more complicated than this. I mean, look at that network picture on the left, right? It's really, really simple. And even the one that AT&T showed this morning was, you know, fairly simple too, but you take a look at this and there's like so many layers just to the network piece alone, you know, whether it's cable, whether it's mobile, you know, those things. But really, you've got the network service elements that, you know, take information from your handset, from your tablet, IoT devices, and bring it into the picture. Now on the right-hand side of this, you know, that's where most of the business people run their applications. So that's IoT, multi-axis edge computing. The ones that are traditional to Atelko, you know, their whole back office side. Things like analytics, cybersecurity, you know, big data, all those kind of things run on the business platform on the right. But if I kind of look at the middle of this picture, that's where we're going to have to tie this thing together on top of open infrastructure platforms. And so that's where you got to take information in, put it onto a, you know, common information bus, and, you know, kind of the choices here. We're seeing it in most of our customers. It's either going to be used using Kafka or AMQ as an option as to how we're going to do, depending on the size and scale of the use case. And you're going to actually take all this capability, have to be able to store it locally, run some rules on it, and then convert that through API management between these two platforms on the network side and the application side. Now the other key thing that's going on is sitting at the top of this, is that how do I actually bring, I'll bring some of that AI business intelligence into the picture. And this is where you've got people, you know, writing algorithms to do capacity planning, how good is the network actually working? You know, one question. The other one is, what's the take rate of this service? Did it actually, you know, are people actually taking it on? Because some services, you know, people try them and they go, didn't really like that. I want a different plan. So if I've got some way to actually analyze how good a service is working, I can use these tools to actually, you know, interrogate the network and see how things are going and use it on that purpose. So one of our customers is actually using it to apply capacity planning on the fly to their mobile network. You know, so actually going out and querying the, you know, the radio network management side to say, do I have capacity to spin up more things here for an event, more subscribers, et cetera? I've got another customer that's actually taking this and they're using this as a complete automation and provisioning of both their virtual and their physical networks. Right, those platforms at the bottom. So really we kind of see it as a way to actually build out this architecture, use common management and automation tooling across these three platforms to truly run and drive the business that you're looking for. And so with that, we've got a bit of, you know, things going on in the world out there where the mobile network is going from an LTE world. You know, AT&T's got, you know, 5G in the labs so do others and some people believe we'll have 5G, maybe some of it early next year. So what's gonna happen to the architecture when we head that direction? So lots of different things are possible, right? So in this journey, we're gonna still use that software-defined infrastructure but you've got enterprise-edge services. You know, we've got faster and faster mobile broadband but it's not just about the radius and the high speed. We've got, you know, much larger machine to machine things going on. And we also need to have, you know, very reliable, you know, low-latency type services. And if I really wanna try and do something, you know, quite a bit, you know, scary to me is let's have somebody attempt to do surgery on me remotely while the doctor's somewhere else and get somebody at the paramedic doing, you know, doing it in through a robotic camera, you know, remotely across the network, right? So that is potentially possible and people are looking at ways to do that. The one that's actually working today, you know, little easier to kind of deal with a more of an IoT play is that there's a collection of defibrillators, you know, so if you're having a, you know, an instance out in a city, they're all placed around the city and then you've got an app that says, oh, somebody's having an issue. Where's the closest defibrillator? Go get it. Here's the instructions here to help, you know, help get this person, you know, back to life before the paramedics even arrived. So that one I can see today. The future wanna being able to do it on the fly. But even to be able to, you know, do, you know, you see when you go to the eye doctor, right, now these to do all this kind of, you know, different kinds of lenses to kind of look at things. Now they just, you know, hook you up to a camera, take some pictures, and now they should be able to do that remotely now. So the thing that we wanna take a look at is, what does this mean to that entire architecture to actually deliver these services? So a slightly, you know, still simplified picture. But if I sort of take, you know, from, you know, the one side of this picture, you've got kind of the centralized deployment of, you know, whether it's mobile services, you know, the IMSs, the PCRFs, the packet cores, you know, deep packet inspection, then you get, you know, things like virtual routers, firewalls, they could be centralized and you could have, you know, the tier one large sites, you know, so that big central office I was in yesterday, you know, I'd have some of that technology there. And as I moved, you know, further and further away from that site, I would get to the tier twos. Then I'd get further away and I'd get out to what they call the multi-access edge sites. And I would have some of the technology out there, maybe the data plane portion of the packet core, but not the control plane, you know, because we talked about the, you know, control and user plane separation going on. So we could do that between two different sites and then I'd put the business applications on top of that location. And then as I move away from those, I can now go to my retail outlets, put some small CPs out there and build that capability for, you know, a retail store, a small business, you know, pick your type of small business to deliver their services and have their applications. And if we then take a look at what's happened to LTE going to 5G, well that whole radio technology that's out at the edge is a collection of proprietary platforms. Now these are gonna be virtualized as, you know, centralized units, distribution units, kind of taking that radio unit and virtualizing it and moving that out and, you know, putting compute technology out there. So in order to try and deliver to this, we need to have this common platform approach, not just in the center. Now we got lots and lots of space for data centers, but how to actually deliver this same common approach, you know, for virtualizing these functions, these capabilities out of these other sites to deliver the radio capabilities for us just to make our phone calls and, you know, get our high speed data wherever we want, but also deliver business applications wherever they're needed. So with that, I'm gonna hand it over to my friend, Hanan, and he's gonna talk about the virtual central office. I'm gonna use the podium too. For those who knows, central office are out there. There is, for some people, hello? Can we use this one? Hello? Better? Oh, okay. So as I was saying, depending on which side of the edge you're sitting, central office have determination of the beginning of that edge. There's been trying to set up, at least counting how many of those central office are out there, rough estimation is around 150,000 of them worldwide. And to get for people that are not acquainted to central offices, this is more or less where they are sitting between the metro and core networks and the end user. It's around this access network actually the central offices are sitting, and this is where we are trying to a stepping in as a first step for the edge. Of course, we have been talking about central offices and virtualization of the central office for a while. I just want to remind that it's all about services. So the first things is not only for residential, is being as well used for deploying business services as well. And lately with the mobilization of the network, the mobile, especially the mobile broadband. This is mainly the focus for the central office today. And I think it's gonna be the same for a couple of years to come. With the OPNFE, especially of the VCO project, we have been working long time with them. It's been already two years working on the virtual central office proposal. There is a roughly about 65 pages of reference architecture out there. And I want to try to resume later on on the presentation. But basically this is what one of the case that we presented in the demo to Radio OPNFE Summit in Beijing last year. It was about providing residential services on that virtual central office reference architecture. And you can see here that the main component, of course, remained the virtual VNG. That's your gateway for providing broadband access. Of course, we have other components as well like firewalls and virtual routers. The whole scene provided services for subscribers. And that was all built on two kind of hardware at the moment that we were using, we were using general purpose servers and as well, OCP-based servers. We have been working with the OCP open compute project as well for a while on that. And it was the same for the business services. So we'll be able to show this one live on stage where we're providing, actually, we have branches right on the stage in China and we connect that to the central office that we're sitting on the labs at Lenovo in North Carolina and where we have it as well, the head office and we call over the internet, we could use a secure tunnel to connect the assets on the branch with the central office and as well to provide a local breakout. That was working quite pretty well and we went discussing with many customers for a while onto this architecture. The main comment that's come after often was, okay, that's great for residential services and business services. What about mobile services? Well, we took up the challenge. This year in September, we were at ONS in Amsterdam and we were presenting the mobile use case. Actually, we use a real network for that. Well, not real network because we were using, even though we were using a public spectrum, we were in a faraday case, so we have phones on a faraday case using the SDR, the software defined radio and what you can see here is that we use the technology that is specing for 4G. So when I was talking about the slicing of the network and the splitting of the network story, we use exactly that but on 4G. So on LT. So we have this radio unit and distributed unit together with the central unit, all of these running for 4G. And of course we have an APC core that was provided that case services for the two phones on the cache. One of the phone was linked to the internet using the same radio and the other one was connected to VPN so that we could have connectivity to the PBX on the branch that we have on stage. So we would be able to of course have access to the internet and have access to the PBX so we could make a call live on stage. This is something that was quite interesting to show. And one of the thing as well that you can see here is that even though we were using very metal nodes for the RU and the U of the brand, an open stack was the platform providing all the components, all the resource for that. So we're metal services and of course virtualized services for the run. As I mentioned, we have kind of, we published a year ago, a white paper on the reference architecture for VCO and I will try to reduce that to actually simplify that in one slide. So there is three key principles for a virtual central office. One of them is of course the common network controller. In this case, we are proposing to use Open Delight. We have been using Open Delight for not only controlling the overlay network, virtual networks, but as well controlling the physical network, so the fabric itself. A common virtualization platform. Here's where we are using open stack, not only for the NFV infrastructure, but as well for the beam. One of the things that's provided us using open stack as well for the beam is that it gives us the possibility to be agnostic towards the orchestrator. Of course, respecting the API. What I'm gonna talk about that in the next slide. And the next, the last piece of that is that we are trying to separate the control plane and the user plane. So that we have everything that's related to the control plane on the virtualized infrastructure and everything that is required acceleration. That's why we keep it on the data plane. So far we have, as I mentioned, we were using Open Delight, not only for the overlay control of the network, but as well for the fabric itself. And of course, most of the things that we have been doing so far is using Ansible Automation for automating the fabric itself and automating as well the deployment of BNF, a deployment of the infrastructure as well. But this is something that has come to evolve. One of the reasons for that is even though we, and again, as I mentioned before, we say we are using OpenStack for the virtual and fabric manager so that API is giving off the possibility to be network acostic, agnostic, sorry. We are looking at how to introduce own app and as well open source manual into the picture. This is something that we're working on as well. So that you can select whatever orchestrator you want to play with the virtual central office. What next? So at the community, we don't stop there. So Beijing, we call that VCO 1.0, ONS Amsterdam, we call that VCO 2.0. And we have been thinking about what's gonna be next. So there are talk about, okay, moving to four, actually stepping into 5G itself, something about CDN and as well, day two. Day two is being one of the critical points for delivering the, actually deploying this thing. But anyway, today, later in today, we're gonna be having our first call. So the key code for VCO 3.0 on the community. Everybody's invited to participate to that. And welcome to provide the input and work with us on that adventure. There is one more thing. I think most of you already know, yesterday we have announced one of our solution, one of the first solution actually for the central offices. We have announced the Red Hat Virtual Central Office solution. This is an open, pluggable solution for the central office infrastructure. We are providing deliver of course with by Red Hat and select a number of partners that are combining us in this adventure. And this provide a common infrastructure for delivering services, mobile services, enterprise and residential services. Furthermore, we were gonna be first focusing on what is, I think Ian quite highlighted that. 5G is taking over all the discussions and we're gonna be focusing first on delivering mobile services. So we're gonna be working with partners, a lot of them actually, that's a part of Radio the Ecosystem. These are our launching partners that wanna be providing the hardware, the network fabric, the operating system for the network, the virtual run, virtual EPC, virtual IMS. Of course, we have as well a secure partners for what is gonna be the beginning of day two as well, related to data protection and as well the services arounds. Not only that, we're gonna have as well partners helping us on delivering that actually. We have service integrators as well working with us on this. The technology itself, so we have already agreed with partners, we will be able to show you this and we will have a set of technology centers all around the world so that you can actually see this work in life. And I hope you didn't expect to see a demo today because it's not gonna be happening and you're gonna have to wait unfortunately to do the Mobile World Congress. There is where we wanna be actually doing the first technological demonstration of the Red Hat Virtual Central Office solution. So I hope to see you there as well. In the meanwhile, I will ask you to refer to redhat.com slash VCO for more information. And that, that's it. Thank you very much. So I'm gonna take the rest of the time for a question as you guys have any. And I hope so. Please don't let the second step. Smart for print, smart for basic comments. How do you see that? Is it coming to large? Okay, I don't wanna spell the surprise for Mobile World Congress. But yeah, actually, one of the components of the Red Hat Virtual Central solution is based on the Red Hat hyperconversion of attitude for cloud. So having an open stack and self integrate into one single component that allow this kind of deployment is specifically required for central offices, of course. Other question? Why grass? I know that this is the first session after the keynote but I hope you guys, well, anyway, as I say, redhat.com slash VCO you will find in their solution brief and with all information that you might looking for. And otherwise, we are available in the Red Hat booth if you have any question and you want to take it on. Okay, well, thank you very much and see you soon guys.