Unprecedented, cloud native platform with bare-metal to services lifecycle management, for -as-a-Service delivery of 5G Core, Open RAN, Private 5G and MEC

Robin Overview

At Robin, we see the need for a new approach in managing software applications, services and physical resources, for providers and enterprises. Today, 5G operators and over the top providers require new solutions that provision capacity and automate multiple levels of infrastructure, hardware, software, cloud platforms and appliances, while simultaneously consolidating Virtual Machine (VM) and container-based services, reducing operations silos and costs.

Robin enables this vision with three revolutionary products, included in our solution deployed at Rakuten Mobile, where we demonstrate unprecedented flexibility, ease of use, and real-time scale.

Solution Description

The Robin solution consists of three key products

•An award winning, bare metal to services life cycle manager, Multi-Data Center Automation Platform (MDCAP)

•A best of breed Cloud Native Platform (CNP), with unprecedented performance and ease of use

•Cloud Network Storage (CNS) with industry leading performance and application-topology awareness

Multi Data Center Automation Platform (MDCAP): Orchestration, Automation and Life Cycle Management

MDCAP allows us to deploy OpenNESS aware solutions at massive scale. OpenNESS comes preinstalled and ready to use in MDCAP.

Robin MDCAP orchestrates and manages the lifecycle of any workflow including, bare-metal provisioning, cloud platform instantiation, Network Functions (NF) lifecycle management, Network Services (NS) lifecycle management and Methods Of Procedures (MOPs), all of which can be triggered through a policy engine. MDCAP’s automated workflows support Cloud Native Network Functions (CNF), Virtual Network Functions (VNF) and 3rd party Physical Network Functions (PNF), simultaneously.

Robin’s advantage is that we not only provide intuitive context-aware lifecycle management for your NFs, services, and Kubernetes cloud platform, but we integrate those workflows with your physical platforms, like bare-metal servers and third-party appliances. Install your OS, upgrade your firmware, configure NIC cards and RAID, to name just a few. One platform with one workflow, not stitching together multiple siloed products. Reduce your integration and deployment timelines.

Robin MDCAP supports 100s of open APIs to trigger different workflows from northbound OSS platforms and CI/CD systems.

Cloud Native Platform (CNP): Revolutionary Cloud Platform

Robin’s, best of breed Kubernetes-based, CNP combines 1-click application onboarding with declarative, context-aware workload placement, pinning your NFs and services to automated policies. This enables automatic configuration of resources as they start, stop move and heal. Just tell CNP what your service needs, then CNP discovers the resources and configures them as per your policy.

With CNP, resources are modeled based numerous NUMA aware placement options including memory, CPU cores, HugePages, overlay/underlay networks and redundancy, applying affinity and anti-affinity rules as needed.

NFs provide additional networking challenges that their enterprise counterparts don’t have to deal with. Plain vanilla Kubernetes won’t cut it from a performance or connectivity standpoint. Kubernetes pods need multiple connectivity options (Multus) and workloads need access to dedicated, high performance jitter free underlays that support network resource reservation. CNP supports multiple networking options including calico overlay networks, OVS and SR-IOV DPDK high-performance underlays for optimal internal connectivity and external to legacy operations applications. CNP provides additional support for IP address persistence across, starts, stops, migrations and healing of network functions.

Furthermore, Robin CNP also increases the security of IPSec tunnels for additional security and implements dual stack (IPv4/IPv6) support that enable IPv4 applications to run in an IPv6 environment. MetalLB load balancers are also available.

CNP supports both VNFs and CNFs in the same or separate clusters. CNP enables CNFs and VNFs to share resources, eliminates operations siloes, reduces training costs, and VNFs running on CNP are customer proven to run 30% faster when compared to commercial and open virtualization platforms. Even more important is that you are now decoupled from you NF vendors containerization roadmap, freeing you to modernize, at your own pace!

Cloud Native Storage (CNS): Application Aware Storage

Robin Cloud Native Storage (CNS) supports stateful and stateless applications with industry leading performance. It provides application topology data services such as snapshots, backup, clones, QoS, replication, encryption, compression, data rebalancing and complex service level management dependencies. CNS supports all major Kubernetes distributions: Robin CNP, Anthos, OpenShift, Rancher, AKS, EKS, GKE and open source, to name a few. CNS is included as a part of Robin CNP and is also available independently.

Solutions Statement

There are any number of solutions that allow one to modernize.  The problem is that most vendors only fix part of the problem, creating operational silos and adding additional integration touch points.  For example, Open Radio Access Networks (O-RAN) is an exciting solution that allows providers to eliminate vendor lock in. The problem is that they all use a separate set of tools for onboarding, lifecycle management and resource allocation. Furthermore, they do nothing to address bare-metal provisioning, 3rd party appliance lifecycle management, service wide policy-based workload placement and Methods Of Procedures (MOPs). Robin has real world deployments that manage all of these processes, at large scale, over 1,000,000 nodes.

Every service can be modeled by MDCAPs workflow engine and then deployed with a single click, at the far edge, edge, core and in public clouds.  As-a-service deployments,wherever you need it, and on demand.

This isn’t just for RAN and 5G core!  This is for any application or Multi-access Edge Compute (MEC) service, including MEC Platform-as-a service hosting with customer self-service.  All of this is enabled through our multitenant interface with Roles Based Access (RBAC).

Robin Benefits

•Proven large scale deployment and lifecycle management capabilities

•Bare-metal, cloud platform, NFs, services, MOPs, monitoring, workflow engine policy engine integration and OSS integration

•Reduce deployment timelines

•Reduce integration touchpoints

•Simplify your operations processes

•Advanced Kubernetes networking (overlay + underlay), required for Mission Critical NF performance

•NUMA-aware workload placement with policy pinning

•Superior integrated container/CNF – Virtual Machine/VNF design

•Decouple your deployment timelines and solution dependencies from your vendor’s containerization roadmap

•Deploy all of your NFs and applications on one advanced, cloud-native Kubernetes solution, today!

•Eliminate multi-product operations siloes – less to manage and train

•Share CNF/VNF resource pools

•Improve VNF performance

•Remove licensing hassles

•Built from the ground up to support multitenancy and RBAC

Use Cases

•Open RAN

•Private 5G/LTE

•5G Core

•MEC

•Content Delivery Networks (CDN)

•Interactive gaming

•Internet of Things (IoT)

•Bare Metal Lifecycle Management

•Physical Network Function and 3rd party appliance Lifecycle Management

•Policy engine integration

•OSS, BSS and billing integration

•MOPs management

•Portable enterprise applications and storage support

•On-prem

•Public cloud: AWS, Google Cloud, Azure and more

•Hybrid Cloud

•Multi-cloud

Robin OpenNESS Building Blocks

Robin has been working with Intel to enable our customers to develop NFs and applications for the edge with cloud-like agility with OpenNESS, a MEC software toolkit that enables highly optimized and performance edge platforms across a heterogeneous network and doing so with unprecedented ease of use, automation and scale.

Prerequisites

Usage

OpenNESS comes preinstalled in Robin MDCAP and there are no additional steps required roe OpenNESS features.

Repository

Download the required binaries MDCAP deployment using the S3 links as given below.

Syntax:  curl "<S3-link>"  --output <file.ext>

Gomdcap (MDCAP installer): 

curl "https://s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/repo.robinsystems.com/releases/5.3.5/vmas_images_bundles/gomdcap?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAIZZEZ4UILOFECIGA&Expires=1631093462&Signature=iOZdeaXHhppIvNeON11jjQAVzFs%3D" --output gomdcap

Note: No file extension required for the installer.

MDCAP Binary files:

curl "https://s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/repo.robinsystems.com/releases/MDCAP/MSFT/build1214/MDCAP.prod.bin.tar.gz?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAIZZEZ4UILOFECIGA&Expires=1627328013&Signature=iQTUsS5YApEW499zdr%2Fifa%2FDwkg%3D" --output MDCAP.prod.bin.tar.gz

curl "https://s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/repo.robinsystems.com/releases/MDCAP/MSFT/build1214/TaskRunner.tar.gz?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAIZZEZ4UILOFECIGA&Expires=1627328014&Signature=%2Ffo6qXRct%2Bg21i9ZZeTaPDnjyl4%3D" --output TaskRunner.tar.gz

Note: These binaries are time-bound. Please contact Robin for in case the link has expired.

Install the Chart

1. Provide execute permission to the installer,

chmod +x gomdcap

2. Install using gomdcap,

Syntax: ./gomdcap setup-prod-bin --app-name <Custom name of the app> --username <robin-username> --password <robin password> --local —media SSD --path-MDCAP <Path to MDCAP tar gz file>  --path-TaskRunner <Path to TaskRunner tar gz file>

Note:  If your underlying drives are HDD then please skip using “—media” option

Example:

./gomdcap setup-prod-bin --app-name mdcap-demo --username robin --password Robin123 --local --media SSD --path-MDCAP ./MDCAP.prod.bin.tar.gz --path-TaskRunner ./TaskRunner.tar.gz

Text Output

Uninstall Chart

robin app delete -y mdcap-demo --wait

Test Output

 
Job: 117712 Name: ApplicationDelete    State: PROCESSED       Error: 0


Job: 117712 Name: ApplicationDelete    State: WAITING         Error: 0


Job: 117712 Name: ApplicationDelete    State: COMPLETED       Error: 0

Contact

For more information on our best of breed solutions, we can be reached at

robin.io/company/contact

get.robin.com