Aruba Edge Networking Now Reaches Data Center And ‘Centers Of Data’

“The big difference here is that you‘ll be able to have a consistent Aruba brand and control plane across the core data center, edge and wireless [environments],” one Aruba partner told CRN.

Aruba Networks is bridging the gap between the data center and the network edge with new offerings aimed at helping businesses collect, secure and process the explosion of data being generated at the edge, while keeping networking consistent across the entire IT environment.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise-owned Aruba on Monday unveiled the Aruba Fabric Composer to speed up network provisioning and a brand-new switch series, the Aruba CX 8360 line, for modern data center needs, said William Choe, vice president of network switching for Aruba.

Aruba also announced tighter Integration with HPE solutions to accelerate network operations and service delivery from the data center to the edge of the network.

[Related: Aruba Networks' Keerti Melkote: The Edge Is The 'Exact Opposite' Of The Cloud]

“[Businesses] need a new framework for the centers of data,” Choe said, including cloud environments, the branch office, campus or data center. ”Because the edge is the new battleground, you want to be able to remotely configure and manage it.”

Aruba‘s new offerings will help channel partners keep networking consistent from the core to the very edge, said Joel Grace, vice president of engineering and emerging technologies for Sayers, a Vernon Hills, Ill.-based solution provider and Aruba Platinum Partner.

Aruba has long been known for its wireless and edge expertise, but solution providers often had to integrate multiple vendors into Aruba edge environments to address data center requirements to create a seamless solution across the entire network, Grace said.

“The big difference here is that you‘ll be able to have a consistent Aruba brand and control plane across the core data center, edge and wireless [environments]. It simplifies the vendor mix across the different environments,” he said. ”I’m a big fan of solutions that provide new capabilities while also making it operationally more simple to manage.”

The software-based Aruba Fabric Composer can bring together storage, compute and data center environments such as VMware‘s vSphere, Nutanix’s Acropolis or HPE’s iLO. This orchestration solution will help businesses with provisioning and ensure application performance across a wide variety of virtualized, hyper-converged IT environments, Aruba said.

The new Aruba CX 8360 series comes in five different switch models and can offer high-performance 1/10/25/40/100 GbE switching designed both for spine-and-leaf data centers or lower port density environments or switching for edge centers of data, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based vendor said. The new switch line will create a more unified infrastructure from the edge to the data center, Choe said.

Lastly, Aruba is integrating its CX data center networking portfolio into HPE‘s stack for a simpler, IT-as-a-service solution for businesses and channel partners. Through HPE GreenLake, Aruba is making it easier for partners to support customer workloads, whether they are on-premises or fully managed in a pay-per-use model at the edge, Aruba said.

“Whether you need Nutanix, VMware or SAP HANA for databases, our partners can take these solutions, integrated with compute, storage and networking, and put them at the customers‘ site, ready to go,” Choe said.

Aruba partners can provide a full lifecycle of services, from day-one to the end, he added.

The Aruba Fabric Composer and CX 8360 switch series with partner ecosystem integrations are available now. The HPE GreenLake Hybrid Cloud and select solution integrations will be available starting in the first quarter of 2021, the company said.