HPE releases major updates for Aruba Networking Central, the company’s central network management platform. There will be more options for where customers can run the platform. The company is also adding the necessary features around security, AIOps and observability.
HPE Aruba Networking has been developing rapidly in recent years. It has been growing particularly fast since the fundamental makeover just over a year ago. Another major update is coming out today. In this article, we will briefly go through the various components.
More options around sovereignty
The biggest announcement HPE made today regarding Aruba Networking Central does not even really have to do with new features, but much more with how you can use the management platform. HPE now makes it possible to run HPE Aruba Networking Central in a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). The idea is that customers can combine the benefits of a cloud-based platform with the benefits of on-prem. This mainly involves linking the agility and scalability of the cloud with control over and security of the data in an on-prem environment. This should make HPE Aruba Networking Central even more interesting for more heavily regulated organizations.
Another new deployment option is HPE Aruba Networking Central On-Premises for Government. This version includes FIPS 140-2 certified server hardware to meet government-specific security requirements. It is currently unclear to us whether this is specifically aimed at the US government or other governments as well (there is often a distinction between the two in terms of what qualifies or not).
HPE aligns Aruba Central with GreenLake
With the arrival of HPE Aruba Networking Central in a VPC environment, HPE now has a very wide range of products and services on offer. It is possible to purchase it as SaaS in the public cloud, run it on-premises, as NaaS (Network-as-a-Service) and now also in VPC environments. It also fits in well with HPE’s overarching GreenLake strategy, in which it is also clearly committed to these different environments. And HPE has been offering Aruba Networking Central from GreenLake for some time now, so it makes perfect sense to achieve parity between the two.
AIOps gets a boost
In addition to the big news about deployment options, HPE also has news in the AIOps area. It says it has added “always-on, automated networking capabilities”. This should make it possible to continuously monitor the wireless and wired network. This is of course to improve performance and (proactively) address any performance issues.
So far, nothing new, because the above description is more or less the definition of AIOps. It becomes more interesting when we read how HPE Aruba Networking does it. It uses a tight-knit collection (a fabric) of AI assistants. These act as network architects and perform the monitoring and collection of data. They then pass on diagnostic information and make the necessary recommendations. These can be about optimizing available capacity and performance, but also about closing security holes. They also detect configuration errors before they have a negative effect, according to HPE.
Expanding observability
HPE has slowly but surely expanded observability. Unlike Cisco, which has been talking about full-stack observability for years, HPE uses this term sparingly. However, that is changing. In today’s announcement, the company does use this term.
In our opinion, HPE Aruba Networking has every reason to talk about full-stack observability. It has an enormous amount of data in its own data lake. HPE Aruba Networking Central manages more than 5.2 million devices, which provide more than 2 billion network services. The number of devices and services is also increasing sharply every year: 30 and 100 percent respectively over the last year. This allows HPE Aruba Networking to offer the necessary observability services to customers, to do predictive analytics, among other things.
However, full-stack observability cannot be realized with just your own data lake. Data and telemetry from other sources are also needed. To be able to add that, HPE acquired OpsRamp a few years ago. Last year, it integrated that into HPE Aruba Networking Central. Today, HPE announced a new one-year subscription to this service. Note that this is in addition to the previously announced native monitoring of devices from other network vendors such as Cisco, Arista and Juniper Networks.
Furthermore, HPE Aruba Networking Central will gain more insight into the performance of real-time applications, especially Microsoft Teams. Finally, HPE Aruba Networking realizes that the telemetry from its own data lake can be valuable for other services that want to provide insight using observability. That is why it makes APIs available to integrate with those services.
HPE Aruba Networking Central is mainly sold as an annual subscription with a two-tier license model (Foundation and Advanced). It is available through HPE channel partners, also in a managed service provider (MSP) model.