Ericsson Cloud System to Integrate ABB Data Center Management update from March 2015

Ericsson, a Swedish tech vendor that serves the telco industry, has teamed up with the Swiss power and automation giant ABB to integrate ABB’s data center management software Decathlon with the Ericsson Cloud System.

The Cloud System is Ericsson’s full-package cloud infrastructure solution, but customers can buy it in bits and pieces as well. Decathlon is data center infrastructure management solution users will now be able to get as part of the package.

As a major equipment vendor in the telco space, the company is in a strong position to capture the demand for cloud infrastructure technologies from telcos seeking to build or grow their cloud services businesses. The telco cloud is currently one of the fastest growing markets for technology vendors.

Decathlon adds a sophisticated data center management component to the cloud system. It has power, cooling, and IT asset management capabilities.

Ericsson has invested in data center management capabilities outside of the relationship with ABB as well. Earlier this year it acquired Sentilla, a Redwood City, California-based company whose data center management software provides visibility into VMs, physical severs, as well as private and public cloud infrastructure.

Ericsson rolled out a new and improved version of its cloud system this week, designed for hyperscale data centers.

It is one of the first systems to take advantage of Intel’s Rack Scale Architecture – a scale-out compute system where individual components, such as CPUs, network cards, or hard drives, can be replaced individually, instead of the traditional approach of upgrading entire servers at a time. Components in a rack also share a power supplies and network capacity.

Intel has been working on Rack Scale Architecture together with Facebook’s hardware engineers. The concept of “disaggregation” is a big part of the engineering and hardware procurement philosophy in Facebook data centers.

HDS 8000, the compute component of Ericsson’s latest cloud system, also uses optical interconnect between components in the rack, a big part of the rack-scale approach. Optical connections are faster than electrical ones and produce less heat, making for a more scalable fabric.

The system also includes cloud storage and Ericsson’s Platform-as-a-Service called Continuum. It supports OPNFV, the open source Network Function Virtualization technology being developed as a collaborative Linux Foundation project.