Rakuten using Red Hat technologies in mobile rollout

Japan’s Rakuten announced it has arranged to use open source technologies provided by Red Hat in its upcoming end-to-end cloud native mobile network.

The network, which is scheduled to launch in October, will use Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud technologies, Rakuten announced at this week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Rakuten Mobile Network has built an NFV based network supported by Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Ceph Storage software-defined storage solution.

The deployment will support the planned launch of 4G mobile services, and leave Rakuten Mobile Network well placed to roll out 5G services subject to government licensing approval.

“Our vision is to build a network that innovates at the speed of software and scales at the speed of cloud, and with a culture founded in technical and operational innovation, we are uniquely positioned to achieve that. We are excited to work with leading partners from around the world such as Red Hat as we work to create the world’s first end-to-end fully virtualized cloud-native network,” Rakuten Mobile Network CTO Tareq Amin said.

“End-to-end automation for both network and services is a pillar of our systems building strategy, and by using Red Hat’s open source technology we can achieve automation and auto-scaling, enabling more productive operations and allowing us to provide cost-effective services to our customers.”