Aruba Networks: The shift to ‘Centers of data’ requires software-defined networking at the edge
Aruba recently announced new data center solutions to help simplify IT operations, accelerate service delivery, and streamline IT deployment. These solutions include new orchestration software for Aruba CX switches that bring a cloud-like-operations to the data center edge, simplifying and speeding service delivery, new Aruba CX switch models designed for flexible, right-sized, cloud-managed switch options from the edge to traditional data centers, and new pre-engineered HPE and partner solutions that integrate compute, storage, and networking infrastructure in order to reduce the time, risk, and cost of standing up IT elements across emerging centers of data.
The new Aruba Fabric Composer software orchestrates a discrete set of switches as a single entity in a “fabric” topology which simplifies day-to-day operations and troubleshooting. Aruba Fabric Composer is designed to seamlessly work with Aruba CX switches to optimize fabric provisioning and application performance across a wide variety of virtualized, hyper-converged, and HPE compute and storage environments.
According to the company, this solution is ideal for IT administrators who often struggle with manual and siloed IT service provisioning across compute, virtualization, storage, and networking. IT generalists who may not have deep networking expertise (e.g., server or VM admins) can now provision and manage fabric operations all from a single console – providing a powerful and simplified operating model that has been unavailable until now.
Aruba also introduced the Aruba CX 8360 switch series. The CX 8360 expands on the Aruba ESP (Edge Services Platform) vision by continuing to deliver innovative solutions that help organizations extend a unified, cloud-managed infrastructure and operating model across campuses, branches, traditional, and emerging centers of data. Built on Aruba’s cloud-native AOS-CX network operating system, Aruba CX switches include advanced data center features, along with an embedded Network Analytics Engine (NAE), at no additional licensing cost.
Offered in five different flexible switch models, the CX 8360 Series delivers high-performance 1/10/25/40/100 GbE switching designed both for data centers requiring high-performance spine-and-leaf architectures or lower port density/cost switching for edge centers of data.
Finally, Aruba has introduced HPE GreenLake hybrid cloud services and infrastructure-as-a-service to support customer workloads on-premises, fully managed in a pay-per-use model at the edge, in colocations, and in the data center. Aruba networking technology underpins an increasing array of these new GreenLake service offerings including VM-as-a-Service, Container-as-a-Service, and SAP HANA-as-a-Service.
In addition to these cloud and as-a-service options, customers have the option to leverage an array of pre-engineered and tested HPE and Aruba integrations for more traditional on-premises, customer-managed options. These ready-to-deploy, custom IT data center solutions help simplify and speed IT service delivery while, reducing the time, risk, and expertise needed to deploy complex solutions.
These new integrations span a wide range of compute, storage, HCI, HPC, virtualization, and cloud offerings, including HPE ProLiant DL and DX servers, HPE Apollo servers, HPE SimpliVity, HPE Nimble Storage dHCI, HPE Synergy, HPE Flex Superdome, HPE Cray EX supercomputers, Cray ClusterStor storage systems, as well as partner solutions with Nutanix, SAP HANA, and VMware.
The company notes that additional information on HPE and Aruba integrations will be available next month.
Article Topics
Aruba Networks | data center | data gravity | edge networks | networking | SDN | switches | wireless
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