Rakuten Symphony and CIQ have announced the availability and support of the Rocky Linux operating system for handling demanding radio signal processing software workloads.

Rocky Linux is foundational in the planned deployment of 30,000 units of Symware in Rakuten Mobile and contributes to the projected 50% cost savings. Rakuten Symphony will establish a dedicated team within its cloud business unit focused on Rocky Linux distribution and is also working closely with a broad spectrum of third-party vendors and technology partners within the telecom industry to make Rocky Linux the standard operating system for running large networks.

In modern telecom networks, the DU deployment results in a large number of sites that today require individual operating system licenses and support. Using licensing models designed for enterprises with smaller footprints does not economically work. In addition, the high-performance requirements demanded by the radio processing workloads for 5G and Open RAN mean generic operating system solutions are not enough. This is true for any latency-sensitive workloads running at the edge in any industry.

The focus on high performance also improves cost-efficiency when deployed at such scale. The deployment of highly latency-sensitive and performance-oriented workloads, such as DU, requires a fine-grained allocation of compute, network and memory resources, which is accomplished through Rocky Linux’s real-time OS kernel, with orchestration done via the Rakuten Symphony Symworld Cloud Platform.