Solution Brief

Orchestrating
Open RAN
 Solution Brief

Introduction
Legacy Radio Access Networks (RAN) were intentionally designed using closed and proprietary
architectures that locked operators to a particular vendor, for both radio and supporting hardware
(baseband units). Open RAN is a game-changing RAN evolution combining RAN functionality with
cloud-native design, scale and automation.

Open RAN decouples software from hardware and moves the industry to a cloud-native model. The key
functionality is provided by software known as Network Functions (NFs) that run on virtually any
Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) server. The cloud-native model lends itself to, and has co-evolved with,
workflow orchestration and network automation that can deploy, scale and heal without intervention. This
is extremely beneficial for remote locations that have historically required expensive truck rolls.

In this model, everything is now just an application. Open RAN makes it easier to integrate and manage the
infrastructure, with over-the-top (OTT), revenue-generating services found in modern Multi-access Edge
Compute (MEC) and cloud platforms.

SymcloudTM leverages GitOps – an operations framework that uses DevOps best practices used for
application development, such as collaboration, security/policy compliance, versioning, and CI/CD tooling.
We then apply this to our rich set of infrastructure automation features. Modern, containerized
applications are optimized for speed and scale, but we need to go beyond that and bring those concepts to
operations. Organizations with a strong DevOps culture are able to deploy code, in production, at scale on
a daily basis. DevOps and CI/CD teams accomplish this through development best practices that are
enabled by their infrastructure automation vendors.

Using GitOps principles, SymcloudTM automates the process of provisioning infrastructure. This is similar to
how organizations use application source code, and operations teams that adopt GitOps use and manage
infrastructure as code. GitOps files in detail the desired states of infrastructure and environment for every
lifecycle event – build, test, deploy, scale, migrate, start, stop, clone and so on.

Orchestration Challenges
With Open RAN, the number of elements in the solution is set to grow by 100x, especially in highly populated
areas. With this explosion of new service offerings above and beyond Open RAN NFs and services, it’s not
about tackling a few key objectives anymore, but rather about automating everything in a new way that
unifies and wields the solution as a whole.
To accomplish this, one must consider the following factors:
• Streamlining the deployment of millions of elements in multiple environments faster than ever while
consolidating operations stacks through ongoing lifecycle management
• Orchestrating not just your VM and container infrastructure but also devices that you don’t consider
part of the general cloud architecture–switches, security appliances, sensors and such physical devices
• Remote bare-metal orchestration
• Fast, simplified and flexible instantiation of NFs, applications and services, along with automated
remote tuning of NFs, supporting applications and services
• Harmonizing VMs and containers to share resource pools
• Sharing resources between containers and VMs
• Reducing container and VM management silos
• VM to container migration
Orchestrating Open RAN | 02
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• Advanced networking as a service

• Multi-environmental optimization, edge to core
• Stateful applications, persistent storage and disaster recovery
• Secure multi-tenant and multi-organizational monitoring, energy management and deployment of
collaborative services

Symcloud Orchestrator for Multi-Domain Orchestration

Symcloud Orchestrator provides complete Open RAN Zero Touch Provisioning (ZTP) for deploying and
configuring 100,000s of Open RAN network elements without manual intervention. ZTP uses advanced
design techniques of declarative policies that enable intent-driven, repeatable, full-stack, service
onboarding, instantiation and lifecycle procedures, streamlining operations.

Bare Metal-a-a-S & LCM

• BMC,BIOS, drivers
• NIC, SSD, FPGA, NVMe, RAID, firmware
RAN-a-a-S 5GC/P5G-a-a-S • OS, Software Package
OSS/BSS
• Prep for observability
• Multiple server vendors, SKUs and profiles

MEC-a-a-S App-a-a-S Cluster LCM

Multi-Domain • Choice of cluster – multiple distributions
Symcloud Orchestrator • Design clusters and profiles
• Cluster instantiations, scaling, healing and
termination
• Upgrades, prep for observability
Inventory
Application LCM
• Instantiation, healing, scaling, upgrades
• Data Management – snapshot, clone, backup,
restore, import
• Migrate to other clusters
MOPs

Network Function LCM

On-prem Co-location Far Edge Edge
Edge Edge Edge Central
Core Clouds • Helm charts, operators, YAML, bundles
Local
• Instantiation, healing, scaling, upgrades, prep
for observability
LB, DB, Q,
AMF
ELK, CDN
Network Service LCM
Services

Hadoop DU CU-CP SMF MEC AI/ML • Design Network Service across clusters
• Instantiation, healing, scaling, upgrades
Cassandra Redis, DU
Graph DB CU-UP UPF UPF Analysis
Methods Of Procedures Management
• Appliances, routers, pagers/mail

Inventory Management
• Discovery, health, liveness and readiness
probes
100s 100s 100ks 10ks 10ks 1ks ~100s • Network Service to hardware component
visibility
• Version control
• Observability

Symcloud Orchestrator supports the full stack automation of any workflow, including bare-metal
provisioning, Kubernetes cloud platforms, NF lifecycle management, services lifecycle design, and
executing Methods Of Procedures (MOPs) scripts. It enables large-scale management of any device or
appliance – one-clicked automatically or triggered via our policy engine. It works seamlessly across
containers, VMs and physical devices, simultaneously. We make it fast and easy to use with our custom
service designer, MOPs Automation Studio and Orchestrator GUIs, where one can mix, match and reuse
multiple workflow elements, as well as existing executors and scripts, simplifying it into one, contextually
aware, unified workflow. In a single automated event, you can simultaneously prep the server, Kubernetes
clusters, network devices, NFs and custom service chains.

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3 Servers Configure Upgrade Install OS for Configure Install Symcloud Install Symcloud Install Symcloud Bring up
in Edge DC BIOS Firmware VCU for VCU Cluster Primary Cluster Secondary-1 Cluster Secondary-2 VCU

1 Server in Configure Upgrade Install OS Configure Install Symcloud Bring up Network

BIOS Firmware for VCU for VCU Cluster Primary VDU Service
Far Edge DC

1 Server in Configure Upgrade Install OS Configure Install Symcloud Bring up

Far Edge DC BIOS Firmware for VCU for VCU Cluster Primary VDU

Install Symcloud
Agent

6 Servers in Configure Upgrade Install OS for Configure Install Symcloud Install Symcloud
Cluster
Install Symcloud
Cluster
Install Symcloud Bring up Core Network
BIOS Firmware VCU for VCU Cluster Primary Agent Services Service
Core DC Secondary-1 Secondary-2

Install Symcloud
Bare Metal as a Service Cluster as a Service Agent
RAN as a Service

Tasks that once took days, now take only minutes and we deploy all of this with a GitOps model.

Bare-Metal Management (BMM) Lifecycle

In a large network operator’s environment, the scale of new site provisioning could cover over 1,000 sites
per day. Via the Redfish Application Programmable Interface (API), we can configure numerous bare-metal
components. All bare-metal servers are auto-discovered and all of the following actions can be performed
in a single workflow: BIOS versioning, OS upgrades, configurations, FPGA updates, firmware updates and
configurations, driver installation, BMC operations and any attached devices, including NICs, SSD, NVMe
and RAID configs.

Cluster Lifecycle Management

Once the bare-metal environment is set, Symcloud Orchestrator continues with the Kubernetes cluster
lifecycle management. Operators can use it to manage clusters on any cloud, core, edge on a public hypers
caler and so on, where each can have its own environment or Kubernetes distribution. Symcloud
Orchestrator supports all major Kubernetes distributions and hyperscaler distributions, including K3s.
You can design and store multiple templated environments that cover the following:
• Choose the right servers to support specific hardware models, storage, CPU and GPU needs, so your
application has the proper resources; optimize resource allocation
• Ensure the cluster is designed to handle the anticipated scale, considering elements including the
number of nodes, pod density, and resource allocation
• Plan for high availability to minimize downtime and ensure that your applications are resilient,
distributing your workloads across multiple nodes and configuring replication and fault tolerance
mechanisms, such as pod anti-affinity, node affinity, and replicas
• Set up role-based access control (RBAC) to manage access to resource pools, and enable network
policies to control traffic between pods. Set up multitenancy and chargeback to manage multi-use and
collaborative use cases
• Design the networking architecture to facilitate communication between pods and services. Consider
options such as overlay networks, load balancing, and network plugins to meet the specific
requirements of your applications

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• Implement security and redundancies that protect the Kubernetes control plane with numerous
templates to support deployments from edge to core, each with its own automated characteristics
• Implement backup and disaster recovery mechanisms to protect against data loss and minimize
downtime
• Set up monitoring and logging capabilities into your cluster design to gain insights into the health,
performance, and behavior of your applications. Tools like Prometheus, Grafana, and ELK stack
(Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana) can be used for monitoring and logging purposes

Network Function and Service Lifecycle Management

Once your cluster is operational, use our automated and one-click NF and service automation. Every
operation is easily automated and can be simply implemented, with easy-to-use policies, with our GUI (API
and CLI also available). Where there is no expertise, hunting or hardcoding required, our solution finds the
clusters, pods and nodes for you. You never need to be a CLI jockey, an expert coder or developer to operate
it. All application lifecycles are policy automated with an App-Store-like look and feel. One-click and
no-click for any lifecycle event – add, stop start, clone and scale.
• Deploy complex services from our numerous onboarded solutions
• Define your services with the appropriate NFs and let our service policies:
• Find the appropriate pods, servers and storage in your cluster
• Configure the network traffic between the services and the outside world in the desired order for
both overlays and underlays
• Configure your network policies, persistent IP addresses and ports
• Test and validate the flow of traffic between the services
• Ensure that each service is receiving the expected input and producing the desired output
• Implement monitoring and logging mechanisms to gain visibility into the service chain
• Automatically deploy persistent resources for stateful applications as well as their application-aware
storage (as a whole, not numerous disparate elements)
• Scale and operate based on customizable policies
• Perform updates to your NFs and services

CNF/VNF Harmonization
Running VM-based Virtualized Network Functions (VNF) and Containerized Network Functions (CNF) on
separate underlying platforms reduces resource utilization, adds operational cost and complexity and ties
your modernization timelines to someone else’s roadmaps.

Symcloud Orchestrator and Platform run both VNFs and CNFs in the same cluster and even on the same
pod, sharing resources in a common pool (or segregating it), while using the same onboarding and lifecycle
operations procedures, allowing you to run more applications than before. This means no resource silos
and zero operations silos as Symcloud Orchestrator manages them with the same commands. All you do is
point it to the NF package and SymcloudTM does all the rest.

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Advanced Networking
Provider’s NFs need more robust connectivity options, which also include high-performance underlays, to
deliver the high-throughput, low-jitter services found in 5G applications. These additional networking
requirements are not wholly addressed by most cloud platforms and include: per-pod Multi-IP Network
Support, Open vSwitch underlays to extend corporate operations networks to NFs, SR-IOV underlay
networks for high-throughput, low-jitter redundancy as well as NF interconnect, NIC bonding for
redundancy and throughput, IPv4/v6 Support, IP Persistency, NUMA resource network mapping and
Network-as-a-Service deployments.

Automated Scripting for Methods Of Procedures (MOPs)

A MOP is a generic term that describes a step-by-step sequence for performing any task. It tells technicians
or automation tools how to execute the actions to perform that task. Our MOPs Automation Studio can be
used to manage the lifecycle of physical devices, such as radios, sensors and networking appliances. This is
performed by taking existing or new scripts and ingesting them into the MOPs workflow. MOPs can be
executed in batch jobs or triggered by a policy engine that records the change of component states or
receives a notification. Symcloud Orchestrator can send values to resident or remote Prometheus
collectors that feed the policy engine.

With Symcloud Orchestrator, you can take any existing script “executors” and configs, and build complex
functions from them. You can then take these functions and build additional multi-domain workflows. Then
from the control center, you can validate and push out workflows at immense scale. This includes any
physical or virtual elements. If it can be connected to, it can be managed as a whole, with the rest of the
solution.

We can use MOPs to unify the non-Kubernetes, virtualized world with the rest of the solution and we can
even use it to build network slices.

If a technician or a batch job wants to upgrade a top-of-rack (ToR) switch:

1. Verify there is an alternative network path

2. Assert the new path on traffic
3. Upgrade switch
4. Verify upgrade and configuration
5. Test connectivity
6. Roll traffic back to the upgraded switch
7. Assess success
8. Iterate based on pass/fail

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Monitoring, Multitenant Charging and Planning Framework

The key elements to using all of this data are access and correlation. Symworld Orchestrator accesses the
physical resources and logical buckets based on numerous modeled variables. Use SymcloudTM metrics to
gain visibility into the resources across multiple clusters and sites, for troubleshooting, automation and
planning. See where each service is running, the resources and health status, and collect numerous
performance metrics up and down the solution stack, from bare metal to services.

SymcloudTM has insight into all elements, including physical resources, cloud platform, NFs, services and
energy management. It can correlate and display views across any strata from a full drill-down to a
solution-wide view, including NF, application, service, pod, node, cluster, server, data center and
multi-cloud. Using these metrics, you can customize and monitor at multiple levels – not just top-down or
bottom-up. Based on this multi-level awareness, you can troubleshoot, auto-repair, migrate, notify or
trigger a MOPs operation using a policy engine. SymcloudTM monitoring systems give you true
everything-awareness and dependency correlation, as well as the tools to use it.

All monitoring, energy management, charging and planning functionalities are available on a per-tenant
basis. Furthermore, the SymcloudTM solution provides rich RBAC functionality. Not only is there a three-level
hierarchy in place, but virtually any operation can be mapped to specific users. Even users in the same
privilege group can have access to a different set of operations. This is ideal for self-service and
collaborative teams working in a multi-organizational environment.

Conclusion
Symcloud Orchestrator enables you to deliver on the 5G promise with unmatched lifecycle simplicity,
performance, scale, and advanced workload placement. By utilizing Symcloud Orchestrator, with its bare
metal to services orchestration and the industry's most advanced cloud-native platform – Symcloud
Platform – we enable:
Industry-leading orchestration, designed for both 5G and OTT applications:
A highly preferred cloud-native, Kubernetes-based platform that supports flexible networking options,
VNFs/CNFs, application-aware storage and advanced multi-parameter, multi-cluster, workload and
storage placement. Complex operations that once took days, take minutes.
Full solution stack, automated, multi-domain lifecycle management:
Full stack lifecycle management of the bare-metal HW, SW and cloud platforms, 3rd party appliances and
CNF/VNF services chains.
Simplified deployment, flexible and high performing:
One-click onboarding, with an easy-to-use declarative model that scales, heals and migrates using
autoconfigured, service-pinned policies.
Low footprint and high scalability:
Our solution scales down for the edge while retaining full functionality and scales to over 1,000,000
elements, with advanced features like network-wide monitoring, analytics and closed-loop automation.

Connect with us for more information on how we supercharge Open RAN deployments.

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or email Singapore 048946.
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