Aruba Debuts New Solutions for the Distributed Data Center

Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, on Monday announced three new data center solutions. The new designs simplify what the company refers to as the shift to “centers of data.”

The three new offers include: Aruba Fabric Composer software, the Aruba CX 8360 switch series, and HPE GreenLake hybrid cloud services and IaaS. These data center solution designs power edge-to-cloud “centers of data” via simplified IT operations, accelerated service delivery and streamlined IT deployment.

Aruba’s Michael Dickman

“What’s needed is a new architectural approach, one that is edge-centric, cloud-enabled and data driven,” Michael Dickman, senior vice president of product management at Aruba, wrote in a blog. “Ultimately, we must bring a cloud experience to IT operators whether it’s for a traditional data center, colocation site, or new digital edge — with simplicity, speed, and security packaged into flexible consumption models.

Aruba Fabric Composer

Aruba Fabric Composer, which the company built from the ground up, is an intelligent, API-driven, software-defined orchestration solution designed to work with Aruba CX switches. This integration optimizes fabric provisioning and application performance across a wide variety of virtualized, hyperconverged, and HPE compute and storage environments.

The new Aruba Fabric Composer aims to eliminate bottlenecks of traditional IT and siloed operations. It simplifies and accelerates leaf-spine network provisioning and day-to-day operations across rack-scale compute and storage infrastructure.

Some features of the Aruba Fabric Composer include event-based workflow automation, workload visibility, workload optimization, global network control and data center ecosystem integration.

“What makes Aruba Fabric Composer different from other solutions is that the software can orchestrate a discrete set of switches as a single networking fabric, which significantly simplifies operations and troubleshooting. The solution is fully infrastructure- and application-aware, providing automation of various configuration and lifecycle events,” according to the vendor.

CX Switching and More GreenLake

The Aruba CX 8360 switch series (pictured above) is the latest addition to the vendor’s CX switching portfolio. CX is the vendor’s next-gen, cloud native portfolio spanning from the edge to the data center.

The CX 8360 comes in five models, delivering high-performance 1/10/25/40/100 GbE switching. Aruba designed the switches for the data center or edge centers of the data center. The CX 8360 five switch configurations are: 12P 40/100G; 32P 10/25G w/4P 40/100G (w/MAC sec); 16P 10/25G w/2P 40/100G; 48P 1G/10G Base-T w/4P 40/100G; and 24P 1G/10G w/2) 40/100G.

Aruba also offers complete integration stacks via the HPE GreenLake hybrid cloud services and IaaS service. This offer supports customer workloads on-premises in a fully managed pay-per-use model..

The new integrations span a wide range of compute, storage, HCI, HPC, mission-critical virtualizations and cloud offerings. This includes HPE ProLiant DL and DX servers, SimpiVity, Nimble, Synergy, Cray Shasta, Cray ClusterStor, SAP Hana, VMware and Nutanix.

More information will be available next month.

The vendor first offered HPE GreenLake for Aruba, or GreenLake Network as a Service (NaaS), in 2019.

Partners

Aruba’s Steve Brar

These new solutions expand Aruba’s networking offerings for data centers and emerging edge computing use cases. They give partners an addressable market for customers who want software-defined networking automation in the data center without the cost or complexity of legacy, heavyweight SDN solutions.

“In addition, partners can take advantage of the shift to the edge,” said Steve Brar, senior director of product marketing for Aruba. “That is where customers are looking to deploy new digital apps and services at edge locations. They want a simplified, single architectural approach to their network in order to grow their business.”