The telecom industry is undergoing a remarkable transformation, moving from tightly integrated, purpose-designed hardware systems to open, disaggregated, and cloud-native frameworks.
This shift is unlocking unprecedented levels of flexibility, cost savings, and innovation. Yet, such significant change introduces complexities that operators must address to ensure that these complex stacks will work in production.
Enter the Dell Technologies Open Telecom Ecosystem Lab (OTEL). At Rakuten Cloud, we collaborated with Dell to validate a real-world, ready-to-deploy cloud-native platform for telecom networks. The result is a series of validated telecom blueprints that deliver prescriptive, pre-tested infrastructure to run critical telecom workloads from RAN to Core.
The outcome was more than ensuring interoperability. It culminated in a fully integrated, automated, and operational blueprint for modern telecom infrastructure, paving the way for the networks of tomorrow.
I took the stage with Ryan McMeniman, Dell's Global Director of Product Management for OTEL, to discuss this collaboration and its benefits for customers.
The traditional model of cellular networks—where the RAN, core, IMS systems, and hardware came from a single vendor in tightly coupled stacks—is being phased out. Operators are demanding modularity and the freedom to select best-of-breed solutions. However, this flexibility comes with its challenges. There is a move from physical network functions (PNFs) to virtual network functions (VNFs), and now to containerized approaches (CNFs). While not all solutions are truly cloud-native, Rakuten is leading the charge by offering a horizontal cloud platform that supports both VNFs and CNFs.
The transition to fully cloud-native deployments is underway, and OTEL was created to meet this moment. A vendor-neutral lab, OTEL provides the testing environment necessary to validate technologies from across the ecosystem, ensuring they work cohesively.
OTEL brings a robust set of resources for end-to-end validation. With a broad partner ecosystem and numerous automated test cases, OTEL enables collaboration with Rakuten Cloud to conduct deep, end-to-end validation across a simulated, production-grade network. These include live over-the-air (OTA) call flows, RAN emulation, and core stack testing.
Rakuten Cloud came into OTEL to build and validate a turnkey solution for mobile network workloads, from the bare metal to the application layer.
The Rakuten Cloud-Native Platform is based on Kubernetes and has been significantly enhanced for telecom. It includes support for high-performance networking (including SR-IOV and smart NICs), Rakuten Cloud-Native Storage that supports stateful workloads, and zero-touch Rakuten Cloud-Native Orchestration that handles everything from bare-metal provisioning to lifecycle management.
This platform was tested as part of a full-stack solution—RAN, core, orchestration, and cloud infrastructure—all deployed with zero-touch provisioning. The solution was validated using real use cases, simulated live networks, and tested against production conditions.
What came out of the OTEL certification tests is more than an acknowledgement that Rakuten’s software can run on Dell Technologies hardware. The results yielded solution-oriented insights, including deployment best practices, how-to’s, deployment configurations, and automation for both the cloud layer and telecom functions.
One of the biggest challenges for operators is network changes made on “Day 2 and beyond”. Managing the lifecycle of thousands of nodes with up-to-date, secure, and performant software requires powerful lifecycle automation.
At OTEL, we validated our Rakuten Cloud-Native Orchestrator, which automates critical tasks, including:
• Zero-touch provisioning of hardware
• OS and Kubernetes installation
• Mobile network function deployment
• Ongoing monitoring and telemetry
• Upgrade workflows for the infrastructure, including firmware, BIOS, and configurations
This orchestration engine is the key to cost savings at scale. It eliminates the need for manual touchpoints and ensures that every node—whether in a lab or in the field—is consistently deployed and maintained.
Disaggregation may seem more expensive because it looks more complicated. But you can extract most of the savings not on the hardware side, but on the operational side. That’s exactly what we proved. Rakuten Cloud orchestration and automation demonstrated over 30% operational savings, enabled by a single, unified cloud infrastructure that supports both VNFs and CNFs.
Another standout benefit of working with OTEL is the ability to capture performance data across every layer of the stack—from the Kubernetes orchestration to the CPU temperature.
This data is collected and fed into OTEL’s solution integration platform, which baselines performance, automates test runs, and continuously optimizes future deployments. It’s a continuous validation loop—a must for modern networks that evolve quickly with new hardware, software, and use cases.
Rakuten’s solution not only met but far surpassed the performance parameters we had established. And now, all of that is captured and repeatable. When the next test or customer arrives, it can be automatically validated against this high-performing configuration.
Our collaboration with OTEL goes far beyond a typical vendor validation. Together, we’ve created a reference architecture that is tested, validated, and automated, that telecom operators around the world can deploy with confidence.
In this new era of disaggregated, cloud-native networks, Rakuten Cloud and Dell Technologies Open Telecom Ecosystem Lab are blazing the way forward—not just for interoperability but also for repeatable, operationally efficient, and future-proof telecom infrastructure.
More information on our OTEL blueprints and my whole conversation with Ryan McMeniman can be found here.
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