Telecoms equipment maker Nokia is planning to launch a range of small containerized “edge” data center products designed to deliver Open Compute Project (OCP) hardware, integrated with power and cooling, quickly to telco customers.

The products extend Nokia’s existing AirFrame range for telcos, which uses OCP hardware, and will be formally launched soon, a Nokia spokesman told DatacenterDynamics at the DCD Colo+Cloud event in Dallas this week. 

michael moore nokia
Michael Moore, sales lead for AirFrame and Telco Cloud, Nnokia – Peter Judge / DCD

Faster revenue

”We are bringing out a line of containerized, modular edge data centers,” said Michael Moore, sales lead for AirFrame and Nokia’s Telco Cloud product. These products will be pre-integrated and pre-configured, and can even be delivered with the customer’s preferred software installed, which Moore says will ”reduce the time between the customer making the order and realizing some revenue from it.”

These will be custom built containers, which are engineered for the taller OCP racks, Moore said, and the range will extend down to micro data centers and up to the size of small shipping containers, where cooling and power can be provided in separate modules.

Edge data centers are expected to be a growth area, where pre-configured, remotely managed IT resources are added in small increments at distributed sites. 

Moore also pointed out that modules allowed capacity to be expanded as required. 

Modular data centers have been growing at 34 percent per year, he told us.

The Open Compute Project was first created to share the specifications of webscale hardware used by Facebook, in order to drive out waste, and build a market for low cost hardware. The OCP’s Telco Project, launched in January 2016, aims to take that idea to the telecoms market, where large scale deployment is needed, but reliability has previously been provided by rigid hardware specifications. 

Nokia is a founder member of the OCP Telco Project, having designed hardware for telcos for a long while and seeing the opportunity to bring in white box, bare metal products, Moore said. 

“Nokia is a relatively recent entrant into the data center marketi, but we have been designing x86 hardware for over 30 years,” he said. “We plan on bringing EMI shielding and other techniques, and releasing these to the open community early next year.” Nokia will be selling a full line of OCP products including compute servers, storage, racks, and a top-of-rack switch.