Vodafone Idea partners Red Hat to transform 100 data centres to a Distributed Universal Cloud

Red Hat has now partnered with India's telecom major Vodafone Idea Limited (VIL) to transform its distributed network data centers to open interfaces and open standards-based Universal Cloud.

Vodafone Idea's universal cloud is a shared software platform with the network, IT and third-party applications distributed across different cloud locations. VIL is aiming for the largest and DevOps ready distributed cloud deployment in India. The universal cloud will span across its around 100 data centers, notes the announcement.

VIL announced that it plans to extend this universal cloud as a platform to third party workloads as well.

Red Hat revealed its OpenStack platform is enabling VIL to design efficient PODS. These PODS will be geographically distributed and will be closer to the end-users. This design will help in reducing the latency and enable an optimal user experience.

Executive Opinion

Vice President and General Manager, Red Hat India, Marshal Correia, said, "We’re pleased to have helped VIL setup the distributed cloud platform and further support it is extending it to a broad range of customers, including small to medium-sized enterprises and start-ups. By adopting a more agile, DevOps-centered workflow based on Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud technologies, VIL customers can more quickly adapt to changing market conditions. We look forward to continuing our work with VIL as they look to build out additional offerings on this flexible platform."

Chief Technology Officer, Vodafone Idea Limited, Vishant Vora, said, "Our collaboration with Red Hat has helped us deploy Universal Cloud-based on open standards and systems. Effective working with various ecosystem stakeholders and rapid development cycles has enabled us to design efficient pods for widely distributed deployments running throughput intensive workloads. We now plan to extend this Universal Cloud as a platform to third-party workloads."

More on the VIL and Red Hat partnership

With the Red Hat open Application Programming Interface (APIs), VIL will be able to deliver actionable insights to its enterprise users and help them potentially create a competitive advantage.

VIL will utilize Red Hat OpenStack Platform, Red Hat Ceph Storage, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux to transform its DevOps ready distributed edge computing data centers.

In partnership with the Red Hat, VIL plans to set up a DevOps team, to drive more consistent innovation and help to create new solutions and extend the platform to developers and startups.

Additionally, VIL will deploy the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to automate the workflows as well as to extend the self-provisioning to VIL enterprise customers.

In October 2018, last year, IBM acquired Red Hat for USD $190.00 per share in cash leading to a total enterprise value of approximately $34 billion. In July, IBM closed the acquisition of Red Hat. The deal positioned IBM as number #1 hybrid cloud provider in a USD $1 trillion hybrid-cloud markets in 2020.