Samsung Electronics, the world leader in advanced memory technology, today announced that for the first time in the industry, it has successfully built a Compute Express Link (CXL) infrastructure certified by Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions.

Elements that configure servers, from CXL-related products to software, can now be directly verified at the Samsung Memory Research Center (SMRC) located in Hwaseong, South Korea. Once CXL products are verified by Samsung, they can immediately be requested for product registration to Red Hat, enabling faster product development.

Marking its first achievement through the infrastructure, Samsung has successfully verified its CMM-D product for the first time in the industry this month. The company can also provide tailored solutions to customers by optimizing products at earlier development stages.

“We’re very pleased that our partnership with Red Hat is able to deliver CXL memory products with enhanced reliability to our customers,” said Taeksang Song, Vice President and Head of the New DRAM Solution Development Team at Samsung Electronics. “Through our continued collaboration spanning software and hardware, we will remain at the forefront of developing innovative memory solutions as well as the CXL ecosystem.”

Kyeong Sang Kim, Red Hat Korea GM said, “The optimization of Samsung’s hardware for Red Hat’s software underscores the value of open source technology as an imperative when it comes to expanding next-generation memory solutions such as CMM-D. We look forward to continuing our collaboration with Samsung to further extend CXL solutions to the market.”

Following the successful CXL memory verification by Red Hat for the first time in the industry last December, Samsung has also been certified for datacenter SSD products. Customers using Red Hat-certified products can build high-performance systems by receiving world-class Linux support, complementing the stable hardware operation of Samsung.

Samsung and Red Hat have also been working closely together in various areas, including product certification for both hardware and software, enriching the next-generation CXL ecosystem.

At the Red Hat Summit held in Denver, Colorado, in May, Samsung demonstrated its CMM-D¹ embedded in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.3, which enhances the performance of Deep Learning Recommendation Models (DLRM).

The demo utilized the Scalable Memory Development Kit’s (SMDK) Memory Interleaving software technology, highlighting improved memory access performance. SMDK-equipped CMM-D allows customers to build high-performance AI models, without having to make significant investments, by accelerating the data processing, AI learning and inferencing speeds.

Through their strong partnership, Samsung and Red Hat aim to provide customer solutions suitable for a wide range of user systems while introducing new technology standards to an array of partners and customers and expanding the CXL memory ecosystem.

¹ CMM-D is Samsung’s CXL Memory Module DRAM, a DRAM solution based on the PCIe interface that supports the CXL protocol.

Samsung Electronics, a world leader in advanced memory technology, today announced that for the first time in the industry, it has successfully verified Compute Express Link (CXL) memory operations in a real user environment with open-source software provider Red Hat, leading the expansion of its CXL ecosystem.

Due to the exponential growth of data throughput and memory requirements for emerging fields like generative AI, autonomous driving and in-memory databases (IMDBs), the demand for systems with greater memory bandwidth and capacity is also increasing. CXL is a unified interface standard that connects various processors, such as CPUs, GPUs and memory devices through a PCIe® interface that can serve as a solution for limitations in existing systems in terms of speed, latency and expandability.

“Samsung has been working closely with a wide range of industry partners in areas from software, data centers and servers to chipset providers, and has been at the forefront of building up the CXL memory ecosystem,” said Yongcheol Bae, Executive Vice President of Memory Product Planning at Samsung Electronics. “Our CXL partnership with Red Hat is an exemplary case of collaboration between advanced software and hardware, which will enrich and accelerate the CXL ecosystem as a whole.”

In this latest development, Samsung has optimized its CXL memory for Red Hat Enterprise Linux® (RHEL) 9.3 and verified memory recognition, read and write operations in Red Hat’s KVM and Podman environments. This allows data center clients to easily use Samsung’s CXL memory without having to make additional adjustments to their existing hardware.

“The successful verification of Samsung’s CXL Memory Expander interoperability with Red Hat Enterprise Linux is significant because it opens up the applicability of the CXL Memory Expander to IaaS¹ and PaaS²-based software provided by Red Hat,” said Marjet Andriesse, Senior Vice President and Head of Red Hat Asia Pacific. “This is an important milestone in the integration of hardware and software to build an open-source ecosystem for next-generation memory development.”

Samsung and Red Hat are currently working together on a “RHEL 9.3 CXL Memory Enabling Guide” to help users utilize Samsung’s CXL memory on RHEL 9.3 and build high-performance computing systems in various user environments.

The two companies first signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) in May 2022 to collaborate on next-generation memory and will continue their efforts through the Samsung Memory Research Center (SMRC) in developing CXL open-source and reference models. The ongoing partnership covers a range of storage and memory products, including NVMe SSDs, CXL Memory, computational memory/storage and fabrics.

¹ Infrastructure as a Service.
² Platform as a Service.

Samsung Electronics, the world leader in advanced memory technology, and Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced a broad collaboration on software technologies for next-generation memory solutions. The partnership will focus on the development and validation of open source software for existing and emerging memory and storage products, including NVMe SSDs; CXL memory; computational memory/storage (HBM-PIM, Smart SSDs) and fabrics — in building an expansive ecosystem for closely integrated memory hardware and software.

The exponential growth of data driven by AI, AR and the fast-approaching metaverse is bringing disruptive changes to memory designs, requiring more sophisticated software technologies that better link with the latest hardware advancements.

“Samsung and Red Hat will make a concerted effort to define and standardize memory software solutions that embrace evolving server and memory hardware, while building a more robust memory ecosystem,” said Yongcheol Bae, Executive Vice President and Head of the Memory Application Engineering Team at Samsung Electronics. “We will invite partners from across the IT industry to join us in expanding the software-hardware memory ecosystem to create greater customer value.”

“In the upcoming data-centric era, the integration of memory-centric hardware and software architectures will become increasingly essential, and for this purpose, Red Hat is happy to participate in the joint undertaking with Samsung,” added Marjet Andriesse, Senior Vice President and Head of Red Hat Asia Pacific.

The new partnership marks the first time that Samsung has joined forces with an open source software company to foster engagements across the IT marketplace. As an extension to this strategic collaboration, Samsung will launch the Samsung Memory Research Cloud (SMRC), where the two companies will develop and verify software solutions on diverse server environments.

Serving as an open collaboration hub, the SMRC will enable customers and partners to evaluate new software products in configuring optimal combinations with memory hardware.

The companies will also participate in open source communities such as the Linux Foundation, to ensure that their software technology has full support in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and with other open source software stacks.

Samsung plans to open its SMRC platform in the second half of this year and expects it to act as an ongoing catalyst for innovation in future IT systems.

Samsung is the global leader in the fully-virtualized 5G RAN market.¹ The company’s achievement was driven by its 5G vRAN solution, which has been deployed around the world, making Samsung the only major network vendor to have delivered fully-virtualized commercial RAN deployments in North America, Europe and Asia.

Samsung delivered its 5G vRAN solutions for a large-scale commercial network service in the U.S. that launched in December 2020, providing reliable mobile services to millions of users. The company continues to expand its 5G vRAN footprint, with recent milestones including:

• Achieved 2.25Gbps on a single user device with dual connectivity using vRAN and Massive MIMO radios on C-band spectrum in June 2021
• Successfully launched commercial vRAN over C-band using 64T64R Massive MIMO radios in the U.S. in January 2022
• Switched on the UK’s first 5G Open RAN site and the world’s first 5G Standalone (SA) Open RAN site in Japan — both powered by Samsung’s vRAN

Samsung’s commercially-proven network solutions range from traditional RAN to virtualized RAN to Open RAN — supporting operators’ 5G path of choice. To advance virtualization and openness, Samsung’s 5G vRAN splits the baseband functions into a fully disaggregated virtualized Distributed Unit (vDU) and virtualized Central Unit (vCU). The key to this disaggregated architecture is that the RAN software is separated from customized hardware and runs on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) servers. Samsung’s vRAN also supports O-RAN specifications, “opening up” interfaces between baseband unit and radios, allowing integration from different vendors.

“While many vendors claim they support Open RAN by starting with the RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC), in reality, this is still far from commercialization in large-scale networks and sidesteps the most important part of the Open RAN revolution — which starts from the disaggregation of hardware and software in the baseband, and also involves opening of the fronthaul,” said Woojune Kim, Executive Vice President, Head of Global Sales & Marketing, Networks Business at Samsung Electronics.

Samsung’s vRAN solution fully disaggregates the hardware and software in the baseband, and can support the open fronthaul interface. The company’s O-RAN compliant 5G vRAN solutions are deployed commercially in Japan and U.K. networks, offering seamless integration with other vendors’ radios.

Added Kim: “What differentiates Samsung is a combination of consistent innovation and large-scale commercial experience with leading Tier One operators around the world. This has helped us lead the advancement of vRAN and Open RAN beyond lab tests and field trials, and into major commercial markets. Now, the creation of this vRAN ecosystem will drive innovation to the next level, unlocking numerous opportunities ahead for network industry players and helping operators scale their businesses.”

Innovating Together for Success

As a pioneer and leader in vRAN technology, Samsung has brought together various companies for collaboration in this ecosystem — starting with Dell, HPE, Intel, Red Hat and Wind River. Samsung has tested and validated interoperability with each company platform, which collectively holds a comprehensive view of the network evolution at every step of the development process. The ecosystem will help in the preparation for commercial deployments, including conducting various activities in Samsung’s lab — aligning solution roadmaps from multiple vendors, fostering a fully interoperable approach to vRAN and leading the design process of an end-to-end vRAN solution.

Companies joining this vRAN ecosystem include:

Dell Technologies

Dell Technologies’ telecom solutions bolster the open ecosystem and help communications service providers (CSPs) transform to cloud-native vRAN networks. Samsung’s vRAN solution, combined with Dell’s carrier-grade, telecom infrastructure, will help CSPs around the globe to affordably build and deploy open networks. Dell’s global supply chain and telecom services seamlessly support network deployments of any scale.

Dennis Hoffman, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Dell Technologies Telecom Systems Business said, “Samsung’s commitment to advancing the vRAN ecosystem will foster new innovative services and business opportunities for communications service providers and enterprises. Our collaboration with Samsung and other partners is helping to develop an open ecosystem of technologies that can deliver the performance and reliability network operators demand.”

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

HPE continues a legacy of over 30 years of experience in the telecom industry. More than 300 telco customers across 160 countries take advantage of HPE’s open telco solutions, offered through the HPE Communications Technology Group (CTG), to evolve to a 5G ready, cloud-native, service-based architecture. As the global edge-to-cloud company, HPE’s experience in enterprise IT and hybrid cloud helps deliver a cloud transformation and secure, carrier-grade, standards-based infrastructure to telecommunications networks.

Phillip Cutrone, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Global OEM & Service Providers, at HPE said, “HPE looks forward to continuing our longstanding collaboration with Samsung by welcoming a new opportunity to deliver optimized 5G solutions for our customers. By using HPE ProLiant servers, the world’s trusted servers, to deliver highly dense, small form factor RAN workload-optimized compute platforms, HPE is playing a pivotal role in enabling the Samsung vRAN ecosystem that will further advance 5G experiences.”

Intel

Samsung has teamed up with Intel to support global service providers in virtualizing their 5G RAN and driving new services innovation based on Intel Xeon Scalable processors. Samsung recently announced the deployment of its fully virtualized, cloud-native vRAN solution to support the UK’s first 5G Open RAN network, as well as 5G vRAN in Japan. Both Intel and Samsung have optimized their solutions to deliver outstanding virtualized performance and flexibility to meet service provider requirements around the world.

Cristina Rodriguez, Vice President and General Manager, Wireless Access Network Division at Intel said, “The shift to virtualized RAN is one of the biggest transformations impacting the industry today. Intel’s collaboration with Samsung illustrates the strength of software-defined solutions in delivering flexibility and scalability in real world deployments.”

Red Hat

Red Hat is collaborating with Samsung to deliver 5G network solutions built on Red Hat’s proven open hybrid cloud portfolio, including Red Hat OpenShift – the industry’s most comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes platform. With this collaboration, Samsung and Red Hat are helping service providers drive 5G adoption and realize the benefits of vRAN. Samsung’s 5G vRAN solutions coupled with Red Hat’s open source, cloud-native solutions aim to extend 5G-based use cases by supporting consistent horizontal platforms from the core to the edge for customers to more easily deploy vRAN.

Darrell Jordan-Smith, Senior Vice President, TME & Industries at Red Hat said, “Red Hat is committed to building a bridge for customers to embrace RAN transformation, connecting business needs with the underlying technologies through an open ecosystem of partners. At the heart of the 5G and RAN evolution is cloud-native, open source innovation that helps form the foundation for future connectivity. Samsung’s leading 5G network solutions powered by Red Hat hybrid cloud technology offers service providers and their customers a flexible, scalable and reliable solution to successfully implement RAN at the edge, improving business agility to respond to opportunities more rapidly.”

Wind River

Wind River Studio provides a fully cloud-native, Kubernetes- and container-based architecture, based on open source, for the development, deployment, operations and servicing of distributed edge networks at scale. It delivers a foundation for a geographically distributed managed solution able to simplify Day 1 and Day 2 operations by providing single-pane–of-glass (SPoG), zero-touch automated management of thousands of nodes, no matter their physical location. Studio addresses the complex challenges of deploying and managing a physically distributed, cloud-native vRAN infrastructure to provide traditional RAN performance in a vRAN deployment.

Avijit Sinha, Chief Product Officer, Wind River said, “A leader in the early 5G vRAN landscape, Wind River is delivering mature production-ready offerings with Samsung based on proven Wind River Studio technology that is live in deployment with Tier One operators. Together with Samsung, Wind River can provide flexible, secure, reliable and ultra-low latency solutions that extend across the 5G cloud core and edge to support new use cases in an increasingly intelligent systems world.”

Samsung continues to expand its ecosystem with additional partners with industry-leading expertise in order to meet operator needs for more flexible and scalable networks.

¹ Based on internal analysis of third-party market size estimates

This planned collaboration will combine Samsung’s industry-leading Galaxy 5G mobile devices and advanced end-to-end enterprise network solutions with IBM’s network management, hybrid cloud, and edge computing offerings and network expertise, as well as its industry solutions driven by artificial intelligence, and Red Hat’s open architecture. The goal is to develop open, hybrid cloud solutions that enable enterprises to draw greater insights from data at the edge – from the factory floor to an oil rig or a regular office space – to improve operational performance, increase worker safety, and minimize downtime. Both companies also plan to explore how manufacturers can use private 5G or 4G networks and 5G mobile devices with Industrial IoT (IIoT) solutions.

“The move to standalone 5G has accelerated the adoption of IIoT solutions and will require businesses to adopt an edge computing strategy that allows them to manage their IT environments from anywhere,” said KC Choi, EVP and Head of Global Mobile B2B Team, Mobile Communications Business at Samsung Electronics. “We are excited to work with IBM to discover how our unique devices, mobile IoT and network solutions can provide frontline workers with access to better data and more actionable insights to take their business to the next level.”

Samsung and IBM also intend to help enterprises harness the power of 5G into public and private networks through cross collaborations with global mobile operators. Earlier this year, Samsung announced a project with IBM, the Singapore Infocomm Media Development Authority, and telecom provider M1 to showcase Smart Factory advancements, including 5G-enabled AI analytics and AR capabilities. The two companies aim to continue enriching mobile experiences for users and create new business opportunities for enterprises.

Private 5G Networks Help Ensure Maximum Performance

Samsung and IBM also intend to help enterprises harness the power of 5G to increase their productivity and unlock new business opportunities. To do so, they plan to bring together Samsung’s latest 5G end-to-end solutions, which include a wide array of indoor and outdoor products covering mid-band (C-Band, CBRS and local 5G spectrum) and mmWave, and its cloud and on-premise server-based solutions, with IBM’s open hybrid cloud technologies, including its edge platform and network management capabilities, its integration and consulting services, and its AI solutions. This builds on Red Hat’s recent announcement with Samsung to deliver 5G network solutions built on Red Hat OpenShift, and can help enable enterprises to swiftly customize and deploy their networks and flexibly manage them across any cloud, on-premises or private environment of their choosing.

Additionally, Samsung and IBM’s collaboration in private 5G networks will be aimed at enabling enterprises to adopt emerging technologies crucial to Industry 4.0, such as IoT, AI, cloud, edge computing, and augmented reality (AR), and introduce new innovations across their business that can enable employees to identify faults in manufacturing lines using AI-powered image recognition, use thousands of sensors to build smart agriculture solutions, or facilitate employee training and productivity using AR.

“The transition of communication networks from proprietary architecture to intelligent, software-defined hybrid cloud platforms enables the creation of enormous new value in the 5G and edge era,” said Steve Canepa, Global GM and Managing Director, Communications Sector, IBM. “5G devices and network solutions from Samsung, along with IBM and Red Hat’s open, hybrid cloud capabilities, can help organizations across all industries accelerate their transformation and solve real business problems, while unlocking the true power of 5G and edge.”

Driving Innovation for Industry 4.0

As part of this collaboration, Samsung, IBM, and Red Hat plan to deliver AI-powered solutions for Industry 4.0 and beyond by leveraging the power of 5G devices, cloud-native 5G networks, and advanced edge computing platforms. Specifically, the companies intend to explore the interoperability and integration of Samsung hardware and software with IBM Edge Application Manager, which runs on Red Hat OpenShift, and AI to enable computing workloads to be managed and deployed to Samsung’s portfolio of mobile devices at an industrial scale.

IBM also plans to provide hybrid cloud and industry-specific services to help with the design and implementation of the solutions, and Samsung will give developers access to high-quality features leveraging IBM and Red Hat’s ecosystems and the broader open source community.

This intended outcome would not only give businesses enhanced flexibility to manage their IT/OT environments anywhere, but it will also allow them to simultaneously manage and compute data on Samsung mobile devices with tens of thousands of other endpoints to streamline workloads and increase efficiencies. The objective is to also enable them to draw deep insights and predictive analysis in real-time to uncover new business opportunities, increase operational efficiencies, empower employees, and offer a better experience to their customers.

Joining Forces to Drive Change

Today’s announcement is the latest milestone in Samsung and IBM’s long-term global strategic partnership to help businesses around the world transform their operations through mobile, AI, and 5G solutions. For decades, the two companies have worked together on many projects that have helped governments and enterprises successfully transform their operations, including partnering on AI and mobile solutions. Recently, they joined forces to collaborate next generation 5G and edge offerings through IBM Cloud for Telecommunications.

Additionally, in the U.S., the two companies have joined forces to create an IBM and Samsung Growth Factory to accelerate the co-creation of new enterprise mobility innovations and help companies navigate the new normal. This approach has been critical in launching new solutions, such as mobile banking and safe communication in hospitals, as well as helping people return to work safely with social distancing and AR solutions for frontline workers.

About IBM

To learn more about IBM’s telecommunications solutions, visit https://www.ibm.com/industries/telecommunications.

*Statements mentioned above regarding Samsung and IBM’s future direction and intent are subject to change or withdrawal without notice and represent goals and objectives only.