HPE/Aruba Dives Deeper Into IoT With New Services

**Editor’s Note: Click here for our recently compiled list of new products and services.**

HPE DISCOVER — Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) company, on Wednesday announced a handful of Internet of Things (IoT) services, an expansion of its intelligent IoT edge efforts at both the platform level and edge infrastructure — all designed to enable large-scale IoT deployments by overcoming the barriers to mass IoT adoption. The announcement was made at the HPE Discover Conference in London.

“The idea [with this announcement] is to inform our customers that we’re evolving what we’re doing on the IoT platform, what we’re doing on the LAN and WAN, and then at a high level there’s also a partner ecosystem that we’re working with for enterprise/smart buildings, wide-area IoT and smart cities and industrial/manufacturing,” Trent Fierro, director of software and security solutions marketing at Aruba, told us.

Noting that the global connectivity piece of IoT is filled with complexity – multiple networks; different service providers across geographies; regulation; physical SIM management; electronic SIM management; roaming; connectivity pieces such as 2G, 3G, 4G, LPWAN (Sigfox, LoRa); and Zigbee, ZWave and Bluetooth – HPE Aruba announced the HPE Mobile Virtual Network Enabler (MVNE), or essentially, a carrier that’s specifically useful for IoT applications.

“We can gateway a whole bunch of radio technologies into it from different carriers around world – and we’ve done that and now have presence in 197 countries – and we expose all of the features of MVNE as a cloud service and what this does is simplify IoT connectivity for the end user,” Jeff Edlund, CTO for communications and media solutions at HPE, explained. Connected car, fleet and asset management, and airline telemetry are a few examples of IoT use cases for MVNE.

Edlund also noted that HPE MVNE introduces a new price point for IoT that’s optimized for large scale machine-to-machine (M2M) and IoT deployments — $1 or less compared to $50 using today’s mobile cellular network.

There’s more than one channel play for MVNE: The new solution can be sold as-a-service by a reseller who white labels it and sells the connectivity themselves; another channel scenario is for HPE to sell a license to the service as well as the infrastructure to a larger channel partner or systems integrator; or for carriers who don’t want to onboard IoT devices onto their own core, HPE would build an MVNE for them to onboard their own IoT applications and devices using the connectivity themselves, according to Edlund.{ad}

Taking a shot a unifying what today is a fragmented approach to IoT solutions, i.e. the availability of a couple of hundred IoT platforms, dozens of IoT organizations and alliances behaving like standards, and different protocols or dialects, HPE/Aruba announced three key enhancements to …

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… its HPE IoT platform: increased LoRa support; lightweight M2M standards support, and expanded device management.

Taking a deeper dive into the enhancements:

“The three enhancements to the Universal HPE IoT Platform are designed to take the fragmentation out of the picture for the customer and be a horizontal platform for on-boarding a lot of industry verticals on top of, rather than building, vertical silos,” said Edlund.

On the LAN side, new HPE/Aruba developments address pain points such as not having a simple way to identify and assign proper privileges to optimize the network; the lack of IoT specific automation features for IT, and deployment and management constraints, according to HPE.

The Aruba ClearPass Universal Profiler and the Aruba 2540 IoT ready access switches together help organizations with identification and security automation for IoT. The new solutions identify and inventory all IoT devices as they connect to the network and drive down the per-port cost of wired IoT connectivity, the company said.

A few ClearPass Universal Profiler features: the ability to see all devices for security and audit compliance; real-time monitoring for high turnover use cases such as higher education and retail, for example, and easy installation.

The ClearPass Universal Profiler is a standalone product that currently only provides visibility via a dashboard component but will evolve going forward.

“The ClearPass Universal Profiler is a way for our partners to get a foot in the door, start the conversation with either an SMB or larger customer to help them understand what’s on the network for internal or external audit requirements – and then when the customer is ready they can migrate from the Universal Profiler to the ClearPath Policy Manager solution to do full end-to-end compliance and enforcement,” said Fierro.

The new HPE/Aruba switches and Aruba OS upgrade provide secure connectivity for any device that plugs in, is identified and policy can be assigned to the device. The switches can also be managed centrally from a cloud-based management tool, according to HPE. The Aruba 2540 switch is optimized for small-to-medium density IoT enterprise edge deployments.