Rimma Iontel from Red Hat talks about how the company has ramped up investments in OpenShift Virtualization and what lies ahead for 5G.
It seems that Wind River is not the sole company to have gained from the price increases that VMware has imposed on its customers since Broadcom’s acquisition in late 2023.
Red Hat reports that its business has also felt a significant impact due to elements such as pricing, available choices, and a decline in trust, alongside a growing interest in containers and cloud-native operations.
As per Rimma Iontel, principal chief architect for telecoms at Red Hat, the company has engaged in numerous discussions regarding VMware migration with clients over the past year, although she pointed out that these talks largely center around IT rather than telecommunications workloads.
“It’s a very active topic. Last year at MWC, nearly every client mentioned it. And throughout this past year, many have taken steps toward implementing it,” she stated.
She also highlighted that many discussions concentrated on transitioning from VMware to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, which is a feature within the Red Hat OpenShift Kubernetes-based platform enabling organizations to operate and launch virtual machine (VM) workloads.
Consequently, this has considerably heightened Red Hat’s commitment to “developing and prioritizing features for OpenShift Virtualization. We have focused substantial investment on that and on forming partnerships due to all the discussions,” Iontel explained.
Sometimes these talks are motivated by a desire to modernize workloads and transition to a cloud-native environment.
“It’s not always feasible; some workloads will remain in VMs indefinitely because modernizing them isn’t financially justifiable,” Iontel elaborated. “In certain cases, particularly for workloads nearing their end, customers may only reduce their VMware usage and migrate other workloads into either containers or VMs within containers, with the most challenging ones persisting in VMs until their eventual retirement.”
Iontel shared her insights with Light Reading during Mobile World Congress, where Red Hat has also been active with several announcements involving telcos such as Rakuten Mobile and Rakuten Symphony, StarHub, SoftBank, Safaricom, KDDI, and Orange.
For example, with Orange, Red Hat is set to deliver the foundational common telco cloud for Orange International Networks, “integrating its containerized and virtual network functions with Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.”
During MWC, Red Hat is concentrating on various subjects, including AI in telecommunications, the rollout of cloud and open RAN, sustainability, advancements in 5G, and the progression toward 6G.
On the topic of 5G, Iontel noted that mobile network operators are keen to ensure that “whatever they implement for 5G and 5G Advanced will be relevant to 6G, aiming to minimize the need for extensive replacements.” Some markets are particularly worried since they have yet to recoup their investments in 5G.
In her opinion, while 6G is still about a decade away, she anticipates seeing isolated activities in specific markets like China. MNOs “have 6G on their radar, but their primary focus is on 5G and 5G Advanced,” she remarked.
Iontel added that MNOs are primarily concerned with the operational aspects of their implementations.
“That’s a major worry because it encompasses multiple elements: your revenue potential, the reliability of the network… your capacity for growth… and your ability to introduce innovations… These are substantial discussions we consistently engage in,” she stated.
SoftBank And Red Hat’s Power Optimisation for Data Centres
SoftBank and Red Hat’s AI-RAN have launched a power optimization solution designed to allocate resources, boosting sustainability and operational efficiency.
The global telecommunications sector is under increasing pressure to manage the rise in data demands alongside soaring energy costs and environmental issues.
As mobile networks transition to 5G and 6G technologies, combining AI with networking systems has surfaced as a potential solution and a challenge to these difficulties—providing enhancements in performance while simultaneously escalating power consumption.
For example, while AI enhances data processing, storage, and security in data centers, the energy requirements of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs)—crucial components for AI workloads—can exceed those of traditional computing hardware by five to ten times, leading to new hurdles for network operators.
In response to this challenge, SoftBank, a leading telecommunications company, along with Red Hat, a vendor of enterprise open-source software solutions, has devised a system to oversee and optimize power usage in data centers that are operating virtualized Radio Access Networks (vRAN) and AI applications.
SoftBank’s expansion of AI-RAN data centers propels power management innovation.
The solution works in conjunction with SoftBank’s “AITRAS” platform—a unified AI-RAN system—and utilizes an orchestration tool to distribute computing resources to AI applications based on real-time power consumption data, resulting in more efficient energy use.
AITRAS, which stands for AI and Telecom Radio Access System, embodies SoftBank’s aspiration to merge AI functionalities with conventional mobile network infrastructure on a singular computing platform.
SoftBank is advancing AITRAS as part of its initiative to establish GPU server-equipped data centers across Japan—these centers are designed to boost mobile network performance via AI while supporting various AI-enabled applications.
Nevertheless, running these integrated vRAN and AI applications demands significant electrical power—this comes against the backdrop of rising pressure to boost renewable energy adoption and curtail carbon emissions from fossil fuels.
Consequently, the clustering of data centers in Japanese urban regions has also posed challenges to power grid resilience, necessitating improved distributed energy load management.
These considerations led SoftBank and Red Hat to develop this power optimization solution, drawing on their collaborative research and development efforts on AI-RAN technology that were initiated in November 2024.
The power monitoring feature is based on the Kepler project, which Red Hat has included in its OpenShift container platform.
Kepler functions within Kubernetes environments—an open-source framework for automating the deployment and management of containerized applications.
This system gathers power consumption metrics from servers in each cluster of data centers and from individual applications, making this energy usage data available to the AITRAS Orchestrator software.
Kepler also provides estimated power consumption data based on GPU usage, including resources allocated using Multi-Instance GPU (MIG) technology, enabling a single physical GPU to be divided into smaller virtual GPU instances.
Thus, SoftBank has improved its AITRAS Orchestrator by integrating Kepler into its virtualization framework based on Red Hat OpenShift—this allows the orchestrator to take power consumption into account alongside traditional resource allocation parameters such as data center location, application priority, and GPU allocation size.
The upgraded AITRAS Orchestrator can now also consider real-time power consumption data while dynamically assigning AI applications to the most suitable resources.
For instance, it can optimize resource allocation in a variety of ways:
In multi-cluster settings—it can oversee power usage across clusters and allocate applications to those with lower consumption.
Power consumption thresholds can be established for each cluster, ensuring applications are deployed without surpassing these limits.
Metrics related to renewable energy availability and carbon intensity can be designated for each cluster, allowing applications to be deployed with environmental impacts in mind.
The companies showcased this technology at Red Hat’s booth during the Mobile World Congress Barcelona 2025.
Ryuji Wakikawa, Vice President and Head of the Research Institute of Advanced Technology at SoftBank Corp, underscores the fundamental nature of both electricity and telecommunications infrastructure: “Electricity and telecommunications services are becoming increasingly vital infrastructure that supports society.
“By monitoring and forecasting power usage, ‘AITRAS’ enhances equipment from an energy efficiency standpoint while mitigating risks through distributed deployment.
“The integration of telecommunications and power infrastructure lays the groundwork for the future of AI-driven infrastructure.”
Meanwhile, Chris Wright, Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President of Global Engineering at Red Hat, highlights the collaborative effort: “Red Hat and SoftBank are committed to supporting the future of 5G and 6G use cases by bringing the combined power of AI and RAN to network orchestration and optimisation.
“With Red Hat OpenShift as a common platform, AI-RAN offers a pioneering approach to network operations for service providers to harness AI for improved resource efficiency and more sustainable power consumption, as well as supporting AI-enabled workloads across network environments.”
