Rakuten Symphony and Wind River Expand Open RAN Partnership

Wind River and Rakuten Symphony Unite to Propel Open RAN Adoption

Wind River®, a global leader in intelligent edge software, has announced an exciting collaboration with Rakuten Symphony aimed at accelerating the adoption of Open RAN technology among communication service providers (CSPs). This strategic partnership will significantly enhance Rakuten Symphony’s partner ecosystem for 4G and 5G Open RAN solutions, integrating Wind River Studio Operator and the newly launched eLxr Pro enterprise Linux offering to create a comprehensive and robust platform for CSPs.

As part of this collaboration, the two companies have successfully completed an end-to-end proof of concept. This demonstration showcased Rakuten Symphony’s Open RAN 4G and 5G stand-alone (SA) virtual Distributed Unit (vDU) and virtual Central Unit (vCU) running on Wind River Studio Operator. Rakuten’s Open RAN solution is designed to deliver high performance and optimization, effectively providing a field-hardened software fabric that covers both LTE and 5G technologies. This ensures that CSPs have access to pre-proven Open RAN choices on common platforms, facilitating smoother transitions to modern network architectures.

Moreover, the partnership is set to deepen the integration of their respective platforms. Rakuten Symphony plans to incorporate Wind River’s eLxr Pro into its cloud portfolio. This integration will grant customers greater flexibility and security, leveraging the unique edge capabilities that eLxr Pro offers. Wind River will reciprocate by integrating Rakuten Symphony’s Cloud Native Storage product into Studio Operator, delivering advanced storage solutions designed to support cutting-edge applications, including artificial intelligence.

“By expanding our partner ecosystem to include Wind River, we are fulfilling our promise to provide additional choice for all customers as they navigate their journey toward Open RAN,” stated Raghunath Hariharan, CTO of Rakuten Symphony. “We are eager to engage in customer discussions and bring our combined stack to market. Rakuten Symphony has long championed open-source initiatives, and eLxr Pro presents a fantastic opportunity to offer even more flexibility to customers as they tackle the unique challenges of near-edge networks and workloads.”

Echoing this sentiment, Paul Miller, CTO of Wind River, remarked, “Together with Rakuten Symphony, we are delivering a powerful combined stack that enhances flexibility and choice, streamlining the transition to cloud-based and Open RAN architectures. This collaboration enables CSPs to unlock the full potential of open and cloud RAN technologies, ensuring competitiveness and a fully programmable infrastructure across 4G and 5G while opening new avenues for network monetization. The integration of eLxr Pro into Rakuten Symphony’s cloud portfolio brings cutting-edge technology that combines open-source flexibility with targeted innovation, tailored to meet the unique demands of cloud-to-edge deployments. Additionally, incorporating Rakuten Cloud Native Storage into Studio Operator allows our customers to run high-performance stateful workloads across both edge and core use cases.”

Wind River’s Studio Operator, built on the open-source StarlingX project, provides a fully cloud-native, Kubernetes- and container-based architecture for the development, deployment, and management of distributed edge networks at scale. This platform addresses the complex challenges faced by service providers in deploying and managing cloud-native infrastructure across core-to-edge distributed cloud networks, ensuring that they can deliver traditional RAN performance in a vRAN/Open RAN environment.

On the other hand, eLxr Pro, based on the open-source Debian-based eLxr project, is an enterprise-grade distribution that powers deployments across a range of scenarios, including intelligent edge, far edge devices, near edge servers, regional data centers, and public cloud environments. It offers comprehensive long-term commercial support, professional services, and maintenance that extends beyond the standard lifecycle available with community-driven projects. eLxr Pro also guarantees stability, security updates, and ongoing technical assistance, along with service add-ons specifically designed to meet the demands of cloud-to-edge deployments.

Wind River is showcasing eLxr Pro at the Open Source Summit Japan this week at Booth #3, reinforcing its commitment to delivering proven technologies that ensure telecommunications edge networks operate reliably. The company has played pivotal roles in several groundbreaking projects, including the world’s first successful 5G data session, the first Open RAN deployment in Canada, and the development of commercial vRAN/O-RAN programs, contributing to one of the largest Open RAN networks globally. Wind River has also been instrumental in launching the first fully automated edge data center for commercial service, underscoring its dedication to advancing telecommunications infrastructure.

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