Automation SAFE for Telco Cloud

Telco Cloud

With the rapidly increasing need for more data throughput of mobile, residential and business users, Telecom operators and service providers are faced with some difficult challenges, as the telecom infrastructure is in need of a major upgrade.

Fiber backbones need an equipment renewal to allow for terabit switching of the 10GBps and 100GBps fiber backbone connections.
Network access layers have to be upgraded to FTTx equipment.
New infrastructure deployment is needed for 4G / 5G and LTE deployments.
The core network components need to be deployed on web-scale IT infrastructure to cope with this explosion of user demand for more wireless internet access.
Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is bringing IT equipment into the telco switching fabric or replacing it, transforming the traditional shelter into a small datacenter.

SAFE for Telco Cloud is a portfolio of prefabricated datacenter solutions specifically designed to address the challenge of the “Next generation Telco cloud infrastructure” telecom operators and service providers face today. The SAFE solution supports the deployment of new technologies, in a reliable and swift way without disrupting the existing infrastructure and business operations.

Since 1997, Automation has designed, manufactured, deployed and maintained hundreds of fiber landing stations and fiber repeater stations across Europe in its SAFE modules. Today still, these SAFE‘s are fully operational, running the internet backbone and withstanding any external influences since nearly 20 years.

The experience of designing, manufacturing, deploying and maintaining these sites has been included in the SAFE design for Fiber backbones and FTTx deployments. These SAFE’s are designed for compactness, with environmental efficiency in mind and aligned with architectural and esthetic requirements as these units may need to be deployed in residential areas. There is sufficient space for ETSI compliant equipment and fiber termination racks (ODF). With potentially hundreds of the SAFE units being deployed, power efficiency is essential in order to keep the operators’ energy budget tightly managed.

Regional or metro pop-sites have larger equipment installation needs. Typically they house backhaul fiber equipment and large fiber termination racks. Multiple types of network equipment is racked and a mix of ETSI and IT equipment is to be installed. Given the increased power requirements, the cooling systems and the power systems including backup generators need to be sized accordingly.

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) solutions rely on converged infrastructure technology. Regardless of the vendor, these system all have the same requirements. Here SAFE for Telco Cloud crosses over into Automation’s SAFE for (Hyper) Converged Infrastructure product line. The SAFE for NFV is a system designed for dense compute, network and storage nodes. With increased mission criticality and continuous business operation requirements, hot aisle containment techniques for cooling need to be deployed and increased resilience needs to be introduced into the system designs.