It’s great to be recognized for our engineering talent. It’s even better to be recognized with our partners for developing innovative solutions. VMware SD-WAN™, along with AT&T Business and Ericsson, are winners in the MEF 3.0 Proof of Concept (PoC) Showcase Q1 2021. The PoC received an Edge for Vertical Award, recognizing the clearest demonstration of the use of the edge for a specific vertical industry.
The winning project was titled “SD-WAN & 5G with Network Slicing.” The PoC demonstrated a solution for cashierless automated checkout and smart workload placement. Although the PoC focused on retail, the solution could be used in healthcare, retail, automotive, and education use cases. It showed that SD-WAN and 5G can utilize a powerful hosted gateway and scalable architecture coupled with Ericsson’s multi-environment deployment-capable dynamic orchestration platform.
Businesses are challenged to provide enough speed and
optimized routing at the network edge to get to market fast with
bandwidth-intensive projects such as automated checkout. They also need
edge-to-edge workload security. The PoC provides a way for these companies to
set up services quickly and “fail fast” as they iterate.
In a blog post on the MEF site, Vinayak Mohite, Lead Product Marketing Manager at AT&T, discussed the benefits of combining SD-WAN and 5G and how they enhance the network experience. Mohite noted that as more businesses adopt SD-WAN, “one of the key drivers in this evolution is the ability to use cellular connectivity for SD-WAN deployments … In the next three-to-five years, cellular connectivity for SD-WAN deployments is expected to roughly double.” He outlined how the benefits of these two technologies will begin to converge, bringing better network resiliency, SD-WAN service performance, and application-level performance to the edge.
PoC details
The PoC retail environment featured multiple IoT endpoints
running on an AT&T 5G network. The application supporting the endpoints
requires low latency processing that couldn’t be supported by a head-end cloud
instance. The PoC virtualized the IoT application and provisioned it locally
for low latency processing. VMware SD-WAN was virtualized to evaluate the
remaining applications in the retail environment and make real-time decisions
about the performance of the underlay links and which path and priority the apps
should take. The 5G network can honor those priorities for transport back into
the cloud by using network slicing, providing end-to-end QoS and SLAs even in a
congested mobile network environment. The technologies are fully integrated
with Ericsson’s composite orchestration for complete single pane of glass
visibility and control.
Learn more
Get the details of the project, including an on-demand video demo, at the MEF site.
