Aruba Announces Revolutionary New Distributed Service Switch

With the advent of remote work, cloud storage, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and edge technologies, data centers are struggling to adapt to changing traffic patterns. In the past, data followed a straightforward north-south route, from client to data center and back.

Today, more than 70 percent of data flows in an east-west direction, within vastly extended boundaries. Legacy architecture systems are ill-prepared for modern security threats, performance demands, and bandwidth needs.

Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) company, in collaboration with Pensando Systems Inc., has revolutionized the switch industry with their groundbreaking distributed service switch aimed at democratizing the cloud.

In a recent study, Aruba switches like Aruba 6100 48G CL4 4SFP or R8N88A Aruba 6000 switch were ranked the industry best in six out of six cases. The wide array of Aruba switch models available are able to scale to any-sized business. With price points to accommodate all budgets, even home network administrators can afford the security and ease of HP’s industry-leading switching technology.

The Aruba CX 10000, which will hit the market in January of 2022, promises to deliver 10 times the performance and 100 times the scale at a total cost of ownership of less than ⅓ of legacy switching and security solutions.

Aruba CX 10000 specifications

• Top-of-the-rack L2/3 data-center box
• 3.2 Tbps of switching capacity, 32 MB shared buffer
• 48 10 Gbps and 25 Gbps ports, six 40 Gbps, and 100 Gbps ports
• VSX redundancy, redundant power, and fans
• Aruba AOS-CX automation, built-in Python scripts, and REST APIs
• Dynamic VXLAN
• Advanced layer ⅔ feature set
• Fully programmable Dual Pensando DPU

Enterprise Networking Challenges

Changes in data distribution patterns give light to a number of challenges for enterprise and government data centers. A recent study showed that while most companies acknowledge the importance of securing east-west traffic, only over a third of organizations have taken the necessary steps to do so.

Furthermore, as data centers have adopted higher performing 25/100/400G leaf-spine technology, they haven’t kept up with security and services architecture in tandem. Centralized security appliances are difficult to manage, expensive, inefficient, and vulnerable to security attacks. Appliance-based solutions lack agility and create appliance sprawl.

How HP’s Aruba CX 10000 solves enterprise networking challenges

The average enterprise data center contains a patchwork of appliances designed to keep up with the company’s evolving needs. CTOs and CIOs, network administrators, IT staff, employees, and even customers expect secure, efficient remote access.

As the latest addition to Aruba’s CX enterprise top-of-rack switching portfolio, the Aruba CX 10000 pioneers an entirely new category in distributed service architecture, addressing the needs of businesses and their customers. HPE’s Aruba and Pensando Systems Inc’s combined technology provides hyperscale-like Smart NIC performance, security, and scale to enterprise organizations.

Improved security

It’s difficult to imagine modern commerce without the agility offered by the cloud. Unfortunately, legacy network security has failed to keep up with these advances. Lateral data flow and disorganization of appliances create vulnerabilities and expose data centers to threats and attacks.

The north-south solution to security risks is appliance-based firewalls and VPNs. While appliance-based security measures are effective at monitoring traffic, detecting threats, and blocking viruses and hackers, they lack scalability and were not originally designed to protect east-west data patterns.

With Pensando’s fully programmable Elba DPU, the Aruba CX 10000 is scalable and contains a built-in east-west firewall, NAT, load balancing, encryption, and symmetry. It is a step toward building a zero trust network.

Increased efficiency

Appliance-based firewalls address east-west security challenges by hairpinning traffic to the appliances and back. Unfortunately, this method proves to be an unsustainable and inefficient fix. Appliances limit scalability, and hairpinning creates bottlenecks and opens companies up to performance problems during peak usage and updates.

The HP Aruba switch Fabric Composer, available on all CX series HPE Aruba switches, streamlines data center networking. Administrators can log into a single console to configure a leaf-spine network instead of logging into each switch.

Aruba’s Fabric Composer integrates with most infrastructure platforms, ensuring that users can easily connect to the right VLANs, as network administrators can easily monitor end-to-end connectivity, addressing problems in real time.

The Aruba CX 10000 eliminates the need for hairpinning, and therefore, bottlenecks, increasing bandwidth and performance. Its scalability and load balancing prevent systems - and IT departments - from being stretched to their limits. REST API provides full control over how information is shared.

Low cost of ownership

Not only does appliance sprawl clog systems and leave them vulnerable to attack, but it’s also expensive and difficult to maintain. As a single scalable device, the Aruba CX 10000 eliminates the need to constantly update and upgrade, instead of providing significant and long-term savings.

Takeaways

By the HPE Garage facility in Palo Alto, California, there is a plaque reading “Birthplace of Silicon Valley.”

The company, which opened its doors in 1939, has earned its reputation as the trusted authority in computers, servers, data storage, software, and networking devices. While other tech companies have come and gone, Hewlett Packard Enterprises reliably delivers solutions to evolving computing needs.

Wireless and remote networking is not only the wave of the future - it’s here now, and it will only grow in scale and prevalence. In 2015, HPE acquired the forward-thinking Aruba networking company. As a subsidiary of HPE, Aruba continues to break ground with a full portfolio of industry-best HP switches.

When Aruba partnered with Pansando Systems, it was the start of a new tech revolution. With the Aruba CX 10000, for the first time, enterprise networking systems could experience the same scalability, security, and convenience previously seen only by hyperscalers.

For more information on the Aruba CX 10000 and how you can get one step closer to learning how this revolutionary new switch can benefit you and your setup, contact IT Yuda - Aruba supplier in Canada.