Aruba ESP Enhancements Go Beyond Connected Facilities

Aruba Edge Services Platform (ESP), the AI-powered, cloud-native platform designed to automate, unify and protect the edge, now unifies IoT, IT and operational technology (OT) networks.

This new capability allows customers to adapt to changing environments and user requirements. Aruba ESP is a programmable platform that generates contextual information about identity, location, security posture, and applications in use. This information is used to power decision making and AIOps. Aruba, an HPE company built it to integrate with devices and applications from Aruba technology partners.

The integration of Aruba ESP with the company’s technology partners allows users to become hyperaware of their operating environment. This allows them to quickly adapt to evolving business, visitor and employee demands, the company said.

Hyperawareness

This latest advancement moves Aruba ESP into a space called hyperawareness. Here’s an explanation from an Aruba whitepaper on designing hyperaware industrial facilities.

“At its core, the internet of things (IoT) is an amalgamation of machines in the physical world, logical representations of the physical phenomena acted upon by those machines – such as voltage, temperature, flow, speed, contextual data generated by networks connecting the machines – such as identity, location, applications in use, and business applications that analyze, mine, share and respond to those data. In industrial IoT (IIoT) systems, the machines and applications are tailored to factories, process operations, material handling, transportation, utility services and logistics.

“By securely interfacing IIoT devices, and generating contextual information, Aruba’s networks enable industrial control and business applications to become hyperaware of their operating environments. Aruba’s unified infrastructure, zero-trust security, and AI-powered software – used in conjunction with solutions from key technology partners – enable industrial facilities to successfully deploy and exploit IIoT solutions. The richer the set of available data and context, the greater the opportunities to optimize operations, implement predictive maintenance, optimize inventory, bolster health and safety, and maximize human productivity.”

This is the first enhancement since Aruba announced ESP in June. Aruba ESP pulled together under one umbrella a number of technologies developed since 2014. Those include cloud-managed Wi-Fi, switches, AI and SD-branch. Also, at the time, the company enhanced Aruba Central, a key component of ESP.

Aruba and Technology Partners

According to the vendor, with the new enhancements, Aruba access points and switches now serve as multiprotocol IoT/OT platforms that interact with its expanded technology partner ecosystem.

Hyperawareness also applies to smart buildings for education, enterprise, government, health care, hospitality and retail.

In July, Aruba joined the EnOcean Alliance. EnOcean is an international nonprofit association of more than 400 companies in the building and IT industries.

EnOcean aims to enable and promote interoperable, maintenance-free and proven ecosystems based on the wireless EnOcean radio standard (ISO/IEC 14543-3-10/11). The EnOcean Alliance offers more than 5,000 multivendor interoperable sensors. This enables data collection for applications such as room or desk/chair occupancy, temperature and air quality, energy use and restroom use.

Here’s what Michael R. Tennefoss, vice president of strategic partnerships at Aruba said at the time:

Aruba’s Michael Tennefoss

“A building becomes smart by virtue of being instrumented with IoT devices, so applications are cognizant of the contextual status of the environment, occupants, energy requirements, service needs, security and safety,” said Tennefoss. “The richer the set of available IoT data, the more cognizant and adaptive the building and associated digital twins can become. The goal is to make hyperawareness simple and inexpensive, and that is what the mash up between Aruba and the EnOcean Alliance achieves. An inexpensive 800/900MHz plug-in radio brings existing and new Aruba customers access to thousands of IoT devices, including BACNet and multiple other protocol gateways, and software applications (both local and cloud-based). In turn, Alliance members gain access to Aruba’s installed base of education, enterprise, government, health care, hospitality, industrial, manufacturing, retail and transportation customers.”