Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, has announced that it is changing the rules of networking with the introduction of switching and software innovations designed to address the unique needs of today’s modern enterprise campus, branch and data centre. The Aruba CX Switching Portfolio now includes the Aruba CX 6300 Series fixed-configuration and CX 6400 Series modular access, aggregation and core switches, while delivering the latest advancements in the AOS-CX operating system. This gives network operators one simple, end-to-end switching platform to dramatically improve business outcomes today and into the future.
Aruba is the first company to offer a single switching platform that runs on a modern network operating system – AOS-CX – from the enterprise edge to the core to the data centre. This unique, cloud-native platform is further optimized by Aruba’s powerful Network Analytics Engine (NAE), which utilizes embedded analytics and automation to simplify management, accelerate troubleshooting of application performance issues and remediate common network problems.
“AI-powered automation must be at the heart of modern, edge-to-cloud architecture and, in order to be truly useful, it requires an intelligent infrastructure as the foundation,” said Keerti Melkote, president and founder at Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company. “We believe that AI is the key to analyzing data, providing actionable insights, and automation at scale to optimize network operators’ ability to quickly troubleshoot, remediate and proactively resolve some of IT’s most pressing challenges. Our vision for the future is a cloud-native architecture that delivers true business agility and new digital experiences, and today’s introduction is an important step in that direction.”
Justin Chiah, Senior Director and General Manager, Aruba, Southeast Asia said, “With campus networks, branch, and data centres serving as the foundation powering the digital platforms today’s modern enterprises rely on, today’s announcement demonstrates Aruba’s continued commitment towards innovations that help enterprises address fragmented operations, legacy networks, and visibility issues for seamless service connectivity in this edge-cloud era. Built on cloud-native principles, Aruba’s AOS-CX features built-in automation and advanced analytics for real-time insights, for increased resilience and flexibility, enabling organizations to pick and choose the configuration that best suits their specific needs. It is an absolute game-changer for enterprises in Southeast Asia that truly wish to prioritize future-proofing their networks in an increasingly digital global landscape.”
Today’s enterprises cannot remain competitive by relying on greater performance and increased bandwidth alone. The modern enterprise requires an advanced architecture that is self-validating and self-tuning through closed-loop automation to intelligently support mission-critical applications, circumvent new security attack vectors, and deliver the agility that today’s enterprises require. Until now, network operators have had to contend with inflexible, disparate architectures especially when managing branch offices, enterprise campuses and data centres. These architectures require manual processes across multiple operating systems, resulting in fragmented operating models, networks incapable of modern functions and a plethora of unstructured data that isn’t actionable.
Gartner states, “As update speed increases, it is no longer viable to manually plan for and deploy tens, hundreds or thousands of network changes each time an application change occurs. Making these changes manually is not only impractical but is likely to result in significant errors.”[i] Manual processes can significantly hinder an organization’s ability to move quickly, innovate and thrive in a competitive marketplace. Moreover, many of these hurdles can be overcome with a cloud-native infrastructure. According to Gartner, a “cloud-native infrastructure exhibits the following characteristics:
- Modularity – It provides abstractions for independent packaging of services (such as containers or serverless functions).
- Programmability – It supports provisioning and management via declarative APIs and policies.
- Elasticity – Resources can be scaled up and down dynamically in an automated and policy-driven manner using orchestrators.
- Resiliency – Services are loosely coupled units that are independent and fault-tolerant.[ii]”
Modern enterprises need an edge-to-cloud network running on a common platform to benefit from automation and increased operational efficiency, freeing up network operators to focus on business-critical activities.
One OS. One ASIC Architecture. One Operating Model.
Stemming from the breakthrough innovation and success of its CX 8400 Series core switches running the AOS-CX operating system – as evidenced by significant momentum with winning new core customers – Aruba is addressing these challenges with a modern switching portfolio that delivers a single operating model from the enterprise campus and branch access layer to the data centre, greatly simplifying network operations. The new platforms in the Aruba CX Switching Portfolio incorporate the key elements of modern networking infrastructure and include:
- Aruba CX 6300 and CX 6400 Series switches featuring Aruba’s 7th Generation ASIC architecture: The Aruba CX 6300 Series is a family of stackable switches that offers flexible growth via a 10-member virtual switching framework (VSF) and provides built-in 10/25/50 gigabit uplinks to meet the bandwidth needs of today and the future. The Aruba CX 6400 Series modular switches offer both a 5-slot chassis and a 10-slot chassis with a non-blocking fabric that scales from Gigabit POE access to 100G core, allowing customers to standardize on one platform across the enterprise, including hybrid use cases.
- AOS-CX 10.4: The new version of AOS-CX introduces rich access features to the OS while extending CX differentiators to the access layer of the network. These include Aruba Dynamic Segmentation to provide secure, unified policy across wired and wireless down to every user and IoT device, Ethernet VPN (EVPN) over VxLAN for simplified and secure connectivity from enterprises to data centres, and Virtual Switching Extension (VSX) live upgrades for no downtime during maintenance cycles.
- Aruba NetEdit 2.0 with Network Analytics Engine (NAE): The significantly enhanced version of Aruba’s NetEdit software now integrates with Aruba’s NAE. This advancement enables centralized visualization of network health leveraging NAE distributed analytics across every switch in the network to reduce troubleshooting cycles from days to minutes. New automation capabilities simplify common tasks such as implementing configuration changes or initial system set-up which can now be completed via the CX Mobile app.
Pricing and Availability
The CX Switching Portfolio, including the Aruba CX 6300 and CX 6400 Series switches, the new version of AOS-CX and Aruba NetEdit 2.0 will begin shipping in November 2019. List pricing for the Aruba CX 6300 and CX 6400 Series starts at $5,899 USD and $13,499 USD respectively.
[i] Gartner, NetOps 2.0: Embrace Network Automation and Analytics to Win in the Era of ContinuousNext, October 2019
[ii] Gartner, Top Emerging Trends in Cloud Native Infrastructure, May 2019
