Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company announced Monday a new enterprise core and aggregation switch and advanced operating system, ArubaOS-CX, designed for modern mobility, cloud, and IoT requirements. Taking a leap beyond prevailing antiquated switching platforms, the Aruba 8400 Core Switch Series and ArubaOS-CX are purpose-built for emerging mobile-cloud business applications and changing traffic patterns that are being driven by the massive flood of data sources and growth in IoT.
The Aruba 8400 Switch Series delivers advancement in campus core and aggregation, extending intelligence from the edge to the core and allowing CIOs to derive better business outcomes from their networks. While the Aruba 8400 provides the carrier-class availability and performance that organizations need in a core switch, the innovation goes beyond table stakes to address the need for immediate visibility, greater security, better insights into troubleshooting, and easier automation, giving enterprises true business agility as they move to mobile-first, cloud, and IoT-enabled businesses.
Setting it apart from other core aggregation switches on the market, the Aruba 8400’s most unique innovation is the new ArubaOS-CX, a modern software foundation that is a departure from static, inflexible operating system design. ArubaOS-CX acts as the brains of the switch to automate and simplify many critical and complex network tasks.
The Aruba Network Analytics Engine allows IT professionals to monitor network, system, application, and security-related activities with simple rules-based monitoring and automatic correlation of network activities. This engine comes with a native time-series database combined with event correlation to enable operators to instantly detect problems, analyze trends to quickly gain insight, and predict or avoid issues that often lead to scale, security, and performance bottlenecks.
With legacy switches, IT must not only troubleshoot problems after the fact, but also remediate problems using traditional tools such as CLI and SNMP, which can be time-consuming and expensive to the business. The Aruba 8400 can provide immediate resolution via its programmability and its intelligent policy-based integration with network monitoring, performance, and security management tools. The Aruba 8400 is fully programmable with a built-in Python interpreter and REST-based APIs for every function. This allows for easy integration and ongoing flexibility with infrastructure and applications, including the Aruba Mobile First Platform, for end-to-end network monitoring, detection, troubleshooting, and closed-loop remediation of network performance or security-related issues.
Although the Aruba 8400’s intelligence and programmable software make the solution unique, the switch is also designed from the ground up with the performance, reliability, and scalability of modern networks in mind. The Aruba 8400’s fully extensible fabric design enables seamless upgrades so enterprises can scale as their bandwidth needs increase. The Virtual Switching Framework (VSF) with two chassis scales up to 512 10GbE, 128 40Gbe or 96 100 Gigabit Ethernet ports.
With the Aruba 8400’s ArubaOS-CX software, IT can finally derive better business insights and remediation, and therefore outcomes, from their network infrastructure, demonstrating increased value for the organization. By gaining early visibility and insights into network connectivity and traffic patterns, and using network analytics and policy to predict and resolve problems before they result in significant network downtime, organizations can save valuable time and resources while reducing costs. These benefits can be extended further with Aruba AirWave Network Management and the ClearPass Policy Manager, both of which can be easily integrated with the Aruba 8400.
In addition to the Aruba 8400 Switch Series and ArubaOS-CX, Aruba continues to innovate on the campus edge with the Aruba 2930M Switch Series. The 2930M Switch Series is optimized for wireless LAN and IoT integration with unified security, PoE+ power, flexibility of on-premises Aruba AirWave or cloud-based Aruba Central management, and industry-leading performance for campus, branch, and SMB networks. New software innovations include policy-based dynamic micro segmentation for unified functionality and policy enforcement between wired and wireless, as well as support of the new IEEE 802.3bz standard for multi-gigabit Ethernet.
Aruba also introduced its asset tracking solution, which expands upon the company’s location services and mobile engagement portfolio to allow organizations – particularly those in retail and healthcare – to track critical assets, saving time and resources, as well as cutting costs. Both the Aruba 8400 Core Switch Series and the Aruba asset tracking solution are part of a broader set of HPE solutions announced at Discover.
Gartner estimates that by 2020, there will be 20.4 billion Internet of Things (IoT) devices connected to enterprise networks1. Despite this rapidly changing technology and business landscape, network core switches have seen very little design and software innovation over the past few decades. Organizations are rapidly moving to mobile and cloud-based networks to accommodate these new applications and “things.” However, incumbent core switch technology has not kept up with the resulting surge in network traffic, the added complexity of the environment, and the increasing need for visibility, insights, and quick remediation.
