Aruba Platform Uses AI to Manage Network Edge
Company’s ESP designed to automatically detect, resolve problems
Aruba Networks is rolling out a platform designed to simplify the management of an increasingly complex and important network edge.
The Lowdown: The vendor, which since being bought by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) in 2015 for about $2.7 billion has become the networking and edge arm of its parent company, this week unveiled Aruba ESP (Edge Services Platform), a cloud-native offering that aims to detect and solve issues at the edge before they become problems.
The Details: The new platform, powered by artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, can be deployed as a service in the cloud or on premises, as a managed service through Aruba’s channel partners, or as a service through HPE’s GreenLake consumption-based model. The key principles of the platform are:
> AIOps: The key component uses AI and analytics to identify root causes with 95% accuracy, automatically remediate network issues, and tune and optimize the network. It can help increase throughput capacity and reduce issue resolution time.
> Unified infrastructure: It consolidates network operations for switching, Wi-Fi, and software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) across the data center, campus, branch, and remote worker environments via Aruba Central, a cloud-native single console that correlates events across the domains to reduce the time to resolve issues and manual errors.
> Zero-trust network security: This combines built-in role-based access technology, Aruba’s Dynamic Segmentation technology, and identity-based intrusion detection to authenticate, authorize, and control users and devices connecting to the network and stopping attacks before they impact the business.
Aruba also upgraded Aruba Central, adding new ArubaOS services to drive full-stack management and operations for wired, wireless, and SD-WAN environments, and AI Search, a data discovery service that uses natural language processing.
The Impact: The edge has become a center of action in the IT world, driven by the amount of data that’s being generated outside of the core data center thanks to such trends as greater workforce mobility and the Internet of Things (IoT). Businesses are looking to drive more compute, storage, and data analytics capabilities closer to where the data is being created to reduce costs and speed up the process for making key business decisions.
The Buzz: “The Intelligent Edge is the catalyst that will spark limitless possibilities for organizations and enterprises that want to accelerate transformation and ensure business continuity by leveraging their technology investments as their greatest asset,” Aruba President Keerti Melkote said. “Built upon Aruba’s guiding principles of connect, protect, analyze, and act, Aruba ESP is the culmination of years of innovation, R&D, Aruba ingenuity, and, most importantly, input from our valued customers, whose honest feedback and insightful perspective has helped to make this platform a network that knows.”
“Our large-scale network spans multiple campuses and learning centers that run performance-stringent applications to keep our students, academics, and researchers connected and productive,” said Ron Gardner, senior infrastructure engineer at James Cook University. “We have chosen to take a cloud-first approach to operating our infrastructure and the enhancements to Aruba Central and ArubaOS give us the visibility and insight to simplify operations while reducing our equipment footprint and securely manage our large campuses and distributed locations from the cloud, ultimately allowing us to proactively identify and address issues before they disrupt operations.”
“With the size of our infrastructure and massive volume of data being generated at the edge, we needed a way to identify, fix, and fine-tune the network automatically,” said Brandon Stratton, ES network administrator of information technology at the University of Houston. “Aruba’s expertise and approach with AI-based solutions, like NetInsight, represents a pragmatic path for us to analyze and then act on the insights we capture.”
Related Links:
CHANNELNOMICS:
>Aruba Networks Bulks Up Security for SD-Branch
>Aruba Offers Single Networking Platform From Edge to Data Center
>HPE Eyes GreenLake Growth With Enhanced Partner Program
