Kontron Transportation streamlines rail operations in Europe

Europe's largest rail networks rely on Kontron Transportation for mission-critical solutions. It has created a virtual Data Center for Railways (vDCR) in collaboration with Red Hat, reducing deployment times, simplifying storage management, and streamlining the deployment and upgrades of critical rail network applications.

Many of Europe’s largest rail networks rely on Kontron Transportation for mission-critical
solutions. It has created a virtual Data Center for Railways (vDCR) in collaboration with
Red Hat, reducing deployment times, simplifying storage management, and streamlining the
deployment and upgrades of critical rail network applications. This virtual data center runs on
Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus, a powerful and secure Kubernetes-based application platform
that can be deployed at scale on premise, in a cloud, or at the edge, making it ideal for the
rail industry’s requirements.

Connecting Europe’s buoyant rail industry
Kontron Transportation is a global leading supplier of dedicated end-to-end communication
solutions for mission-critical networks and supports many of Europe’s largest rail networks with
their communication challenges. For example, rail operators in Austria, Germany, France, the UK,
the Czech Republic, and beyond rely on Kontron Transportation connectivity services.
It is a buoyant industry. Pre-COVID-19, rail passenger-kilometer numbers across Europe were 414
billion, a 10% rise over the previous 5 years. European rail operators are investing heavily to upgrade
track and increase capacity, with rail seen as the best chance to reduce carbon emissions
in the transport sector.
Within all this activity, trains are becoming smarter. The Kontron Transportation GSM-R
(Global System for Mobile Communications-Railway) delivers digital, security-focused, and dependable communications between drivers and controllers. This helps to increase safety, reduce delays,
and improve performance—providing a better experience for passengers.
“It is our mission to deliver infrastructure, manage requirements and resources, develop software,
and deploy devices and applications to the industry to improve the performance of critical
communications wherever needed,” said Markus Kirchknopf, Business Solution Expert at
Kontron Transportation.

Hosting critical operation and maintenance applications
Red Hat has been a critical component of the Kontron Transportation end-to-end communications
platform since 2012. The use of Red Hat Virtualization enabled Kontron Transportation to host a
range of operation and maintenance applications within virtual machines. Kontron Transportation
was then able to provide this platform, air gapped and on site at individual rail operators, using external storage to hold data. Kontron Transportation currently uses Red Hat Virtualization,
a software-defined platform, to virtualize workloads running mostly on Red Hat Enterprise Linux,
a consistent operating system foundation for hybrid cloud and traditional infrastructure.
This approach underpinned a period of rapid growth for Kontron Transportation. The business now
works with more than 70 railway operators and generates annual revenues of €110 million.
However, Kontron Transportation recognized challenges around the long-term viability of the
platform. With data amounts rising, customers wanted assurance on long-life support; they also
wanted to be faster to deploy new network functions for smaller projects.
With Red Hat Virtualization end-of-life on the horizon and in search of a solution that would
provide the container capabilities, Kontron Transportation turned to Red Hat Technical Account
Management for Partners. Kontron Transportation began exploring a fresh approach. “We could
see containers were the direction of travel,” said Kirchknopf. “And that containers were an easy
conversation to have with Red Hat.”

Powering railway technology solutions with a container-based approach
Kontron Transportation chose Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus to power its railway technology solutions, providing the railway sector with a security-focused, reliable, and scalable virtual Data Center
for Railways (vDCR) solution.
The Kontron Transportation vDCR solution is designed to meet the needs of the railway industry
by providing a platform that can help enterprises build, deploy, and manage applications at scale.
This comprehensive platform can help enterprises migrate existing workloads to their private cloud,
build digital user experiences, or deploy next-generation applications to the Future Railway Mobile
Communication System (FRMCS) ecosystem. Migration is offered by OpenShift’s Virtualization
add-on, which gives Kontron Transportation the possibility to move applications hosted on the
existing Red Hat Virtualization solution to vDCR without changing their entire architecture.
“Being able to migrate our existing applications to the Red Hat OpenShift platform, with the
knowledge we could add new applications in the future, that was a huge positive for us,” said
Kirchknopf. “It removes the external storage headache, takes us out of the hardware business,
and creates a hyper-converged infrastructure.”

Strengthening links to Europe’s biggest rail operators

Simplified infrastructure requirements
The creation of a vDCR promises to dramatically simplify customer engagements. “Having compute,
storage, and networking in one place will give us greater flexibility. It means we have fewer things to
consider when looking at a new deployment,” said Kirchknopf.
Rail operators, he admitted, may be unaware of the difference. “Rail operators aren’t focused on the
connectivity or the platform. Their priority is that the applications are running correctly. What our
customers care about is that the connectivity infrastructure is reliable, and they can consume our
services without interruption.”
By enabling Kontron Transportation to develop and maintain its own virtual infrastructure, the vDCR
on Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus contributes to the simplification of infrastructure requirements.
OpenShift Platform Plus gives Kontron Transportation a comprehensive set of tools and resources
to assist with rapid provisioning, configuration, and management of business-critical applications.
The platform is also built to be highly available, ensuring that even in the event of unplanned outages,
applications will continue to function.

Accelerated deployment times for new projects
Kontron Transportation anticipates the vDCR will reduce deployment times for customers. This will
allow customers to create dedicated deployments for one-off projects. The Kontron Transportation
first vDCR customer involves a French public sector rail project. The project is racing to complete
trials of new tracks and trains for go-live in the summer of 2024.
The use of containers means applications can be upgraded, patched, or ported with no impact on
the customer. Kontron Transportation is identifying processes to be automated, further improving
deployment speeds.

The Kontron Transportation vDCR eliminates the need for manual setup and configuration.
Additionally, OpenShift Platform Plus offers premade templates that can be used to quickly deploy,
configure, and strengthen the security of applications and services, helping to further reduce
deployment times without sacrificing security. The benefit of easy scaling an existing vDCR cluster
gives Kontron Transportation’s customers the ability to have a reusable environment for future
needs.

Enabled focus on application innovation
Kontron Transportation is at the forefront of international research and development, and its
projects include the European Telecommunications Standards Institute, the 3rd Generation
Partnership Project, Shift2Rai (an initiative to double the capacity of the European rail system),
and 5G-Victori (large-scale field trials for use-cases involving 5G). The simplicity of the vDCR allows
Kontron Transportation to unlock resources and focus on application development, rather than
infrastructure development and management.
“We recognize the opportunity to transform communications across the rail network with 5G,” said
Kirchknopf. “That is an area of focus for the future.”
Furthermore, the open source nature of the platform allows customizations and integrations of
existing technologies, as well as robust monitoring and logging capabilities, which enables Kontron
Transportation to identify and address potential issues quickly. The long-term impact of this platform
is expected to be significant.

Strengthening links to Europe’s biggest rail operators
The 10-year engagement with Red Hat is likely to deepen. Kontron Transportation is looking next to
improve scalability, automation, and security across its application platform.
“We’re looking at zero-touch provisioning, security reports across every application, and further ways
of improving productivity. We have a long-running relationship with Red Hat that continues to find
improvements to our platform. This strong partnership is essential to our future plans.”

About Kontron Transportation
Kontron Transportation GmbH is a global leading supplier of dedicated end-to-end communication
solutions for mission-critical networks that offers tailor-made solutions to support its customers with
their communication challenges.
The company’s focus is to produce, transport, and process voice, data, and video information reliably
with an emphasis on security in an efficient and sustainable way. The core product portfolio includes
GSM-Railways, FRMCS (future railway mobile communication system), MCx (mission-critical over
public networks), 4G/5G public network solutions, and IIoT solutions focusing on data processing.
The main customers are railways and public transport operators all over Europe.
Kontron Transportation drives the evolution into the next generation of broadband solutions for
mission-critical networks, for instance as an associated member of the European research initiative
Shift2Rail. www.kontron.com/ktrdn

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