Canonical
on 15 May 2025
A broadband remote access server (BRAS) is an access gateway oriented to broadband network applications. It bridges broadband access and backbone networks, providing basic access methods and management functions for broadband access networks.
Traditionally, BRAS has suffered from challenges, including low resource utilization, complex management and maintenance, and slow service provisioning. Virtual broadband remote access server (vBRAS) offers a way to address these challenges, accelerating service rollout, improving resource utilization, and simplifying operations and maintenance (O&M).
Huawei and Canonical have worked together to design and verify a private cloud architecture for vBRAS based on Huawei OceanStor storage and Canonical Charmed OpenStack. The solution gives telcos a reliable, performant and cost efficient way to implement network functions virtualization infrastructure (NFVI) for vBRAS.
BRAS challenges and vBRAS
The traditional BRASs are deployed in distributed mode and fully meshed with peripheral systems. As the number of home broadband users surges and emerging services such as 4K high definition (HD) and Internet of Things (IoT) develop rapidly, the traditional distributed BRAS deployment solution faces the following significant challenges:
-Low resource utilization
-Complex management and maintenance
-Slow service provisioning
vBRAS adopts an architecture based on virtualization technologies. It virtualizes traditional hardware BRAS functions and implements software-based network functions, improving network flexibility and scalability.
vBRAS solutions featuring the cloud-based control and user plane separation (CUPS) architecture are implemented based on the centralized management and control capabilities brought by software defined networking (SDN) and the device cloudification capabilities brought by network functions virtualization (NFV). NFV is a network architecture in which traditional network devices are virtualized into software modules running on universal hardware. The vBRAS solution focuses on unified management of vBRAS-vUPs and vBRAS-pUPs, and uses the CUPS vBRAS architecture mentioned earlier. The CUPS architecture is the most cost-effective solution for evolving toward the all-cloud era.
NFVI reference architecture for vBRAS
To achieve reliability, performance, and cost efficiency for vBRAS, Canonical and Huawei field engineering teams have designed and verified a private cloud architecture for vBRAS. It is based on Huawei OceanStor storage and the open source Canonical OpenStack. The main components and key features include:
-Fully disaggregated architecture with dedicated controller nodes. Compute nodes for management and orchestration (MANO) and VNF workloads.
-Dedicated storage from OceanStor, with all virtual machines backed by OceanStor. A small ceph storage cluster is available for glance/images only.
-Instance HA from Openstack Masakara and two separated OceanStor storages provide another higher reliability. The Cinder-Huawei charm was enhanced to support multi-backend during this verification.
-Separated networks with pure OVN (open virtual network) for general workload (MANO), and high performance OVN+DPDK (data plane development kit – for network acceleration), cpu pin and huge pages for VNFs workloads.
-Infrastructure management and automation from Canonical MAAS and Juju, Canonical Observability Stack (COS), and Landscape and Kernel Livepatch from Ubuntu Pro.
-BRAS VNFs orchestration provided by Huawei’s MANO.
The latest versions of MANO and vBRAS are tested and verified with a 10 years lifecycle version of Ubuntu and OpenStack (Ubuntu 20.04 Server LTS and Ussuri Charmed OpenStack).
Huawei OceanStor
Huawei OceanStor storage unlocks new levels of intelligence and power. It offers converged and flexible storage solutions that boast the power and reliability needed to meet green, sustainable, and future-facing development goals.
Huawei OceanStor Dorado systems are the next-gen all-flash storage systems. They are designed to meet the major concerns of high availability, utilization, and usability for medium and large enterprises, offering huge storage capacity and quick data access. OceanStor Dorado 5000 and 6000 excel in database, virtualization, and big data analytics scenarios, making them well-suited to industries such as carrier, finance, government, and manufacturing.
Canonical OpenStack
Ubuntu Server powers 48% of OpenStack clouds globally, and leading companies across industries – including telco, finance, hardware manufacturing, retail, automotive, and healthcare – choose Canonical OpenStack as the platform for their private cloud implementations. Canonical OpenStack is an enterprise cloud platform engineered for price-performance, making it the ideal choice for telecommunications companies that demand the highest levels of infrastructure stability, security, and resilience:
Designed to be economical in every way: we use optimal architecture including server
types and their components to run more VMs. In our case studies, our approach has
reduced costs by as much as 80% for 40 nodes. We use open-source software to avoid
high licence costs and automation to cut spendings on operations.
Total bottom-up automation: enjoy fully automated OpenStack deployment and
operations thanks to Canonical’s tooling and MANO.
Reliability and high availability for vBRAS: our reference architecture includes
redundancy for hardware components to eliminate single points of failure. All controller
services are deployed as clusters and designed for fault tolerance. Instance high
availability from OpenStack Masakara and running vBRAS across 2 regions provide
99.9% availability.
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