An Interview with Rakuten: Gold Winner of Network Virtualisation Innovation of the Year

Juniper Research interviewed Partha Seetala, President, Cloud BU at Rakuten Symphony, in November 2023. Rakuten was a Gold Winner for Network Virtualisation Innovation of the Year in our 2023 Future Digital Awards for Telco Innovation.

Partha Seetala is the President of the Cloud Business Unit at Rakuten Symphony and formerly the Founder and CEO at Robin.io. With more than 20 years' technology and product vision and expertise, he has taken multiple fully featured products from concept to market. He has conceived, designed, and built products in Scale-out Distributed Storage, File Systems, Networking, Distributed Systems, Big Data, and Information Analytics and the Containers/Kubernetes space.

Prior to founding Robin.io, which was acquired by Rakuten Symphony in 2022, he was a Distinguished Engineer at Symantec’s information and storage management business, known as Veritas. In that capacity, he conceived, architected, and led engineering teams to take multiple products from concept to market. He was also an adviser on multimillion-dollar product lines, including NetBackup, Cluster File System, Veritas Cluster Server, and Information Fabric. He holds a master’s degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Minnesota.

Rakuten Symphony Symcloud has proven 5G deployment at scale. What makes Symcloud unique, especially for network operators?

"Rakuten Symphony’s products cater to the cloud-native platforms telco workloads run on-- from the RAN (Radio Access Networks) to core to MEC, as well as in orchestration platforms that focus on multiple domains, including the infrastructure and service layers.

When you're running a telco network, you're running at scale. The workloads that you run are sensitive to the performance that they require. Operators expect a certain level of reliability, low latency and high throughput."

Tell us more about the industry-leading innovations that Symcloud brings for the cloud-native transformation of the telco stack?

"We make it simple for operators to deploy network functions at scale, and enable them to do  it cost-efficiently. We help deploy workloads and achieve predictable performance as operators lower overall costsTCO (Total Cost of Ownership) provides services to make the post-deployment lifecycle management incredibly simple. Once a network function is deployed, it has a long lifecycle after that.

If you look at a network function, it is heavily reliant on the capabilities and underlying infrastructure on the network level, on the storage level, and on the compute side when launching a large network. An ideal solution must define requirements for the network function without going into the manual work of figuring out where it is deployed or how it gets the appropriate resources from the underlying hardware. So essentially, you treat the entire network of servers as a pool of resources that can be programmatically allocated to network functions.

If you can architect a solution like that, it becomes easier to onboard network functions, and that is what Rakuten does. On the cost side, there are several aspects, such as the licencing itself. 

What we have done right through our experience deploying these complex workloads is figure out what to do architecturally in our product, so that the operational aspects can be programmatically enabled."

How does Symcloud differentiate itself from other similar solutions?

"There are several innovations we have patented across networking, storage, computing and GPUs (Graphical Processing Units), where we can isolate all physical resources and infrastructure in such a way that you can get predictable performance from network functions. 

Again, without requiring manual configuration, the networks are all automatically discovered and programmatically enabled when it comes to deployment. That's how we deliver predictable high performance and low latency. 

Choosing a cloud-native platform can be a difficult choice for operators as these services are complex and  often harder to comprehend. It's difficult to know if service providers are offering all these services that provide differentiation. Rakuten adds all the capabilities required to ensure a platform is hardened and has a predictable release cycle."

As 5G becomes increasingly prevalent in the world, how does Symcloud help accelerate 5G & Edge roll-out?

"Network virtualisation dominated telco discussions for years, and would highlight the benefits of virtualisation. In the enterprise space, we are now in that phase of being cloud-native, and we understand the benefits of being cloud native.

However, given that it is such a complex domain which cuts across container orchestration, storage, networking, automation, orchestration, CPU, computer management, and infrastructure management, it becomes hard for users to essentially have those skills or acquire all those skills, so that people can manage their own networks.

Now to become successful in cloud-native service provision, I think the operators have to do two things: Firstly, they have to be moderately competent in asking the right questions to the vendors as to how they will not suffer the same pain that they suffered when we went through the virtualisation-based transformation. That essentially means that the mindset within the operator also has to change, saying that for us to become cloud native, this is the base level of understanding we need to have about cloud native.

Secondly, once operators build understanding, they'll be able to ask the right questions to the vendors. But those things can only happen when the operator has at least a passing understanding of what cloud-native technology can really do."

Symcloud has won some of the most coveted industry awards this year, including the Glomo award for Cloud. What does the future look like from here for Symcloud?

"Amazon's AWS division had a massive advantage because the Amazon eCommerce platform was there, learning at a playground to create all that innovation. When we have this large, massive network, instead of just hearing the requirements from other customers, we face those pain points ourselves.

So we have a clear view of where the biggest pains are in terms of how we can squeeze out a better TCO, how we can improve the utilisation of networks, and how we can ease operations. 

We will bring in new types of hardware classes that provide innovation, whether it is from Intel or another chipset vendor. Expect a lot of innovation along those lines from us in the future."