Aruba comes up with disruptive switching architecture

Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company has introduced the industry’s first Distributed Services Switch enabling enterprises to deploy software-defined stateful services where data is created and processed, eliminating legacy appliances and host software needed to build the hybrid clouds demanded by modern applications and IT organisations.

“Markets in transition create new opportunities for disruption. As the cloud moves to the edge, distributed services are disrupting everything from AI/ML, to 5G and virtualisation,” said John Chambers, Chairman of Pensando, CEO of JC2 Ventures, and former CEO of Cisco Systems. “This new category, the Distributed Services Switch, enabled by Pensando software-in-silicon, makes the process of deploying distributed services, previously only available to hyperscalers like AWS, in the enterprise both simple and more cost-effective. By eliminating legacy appliances and host software, enterprises can deliver 100x the scale and 10x the performance at 1/3 the TCO of traditional approaches.”

The Aruba CX 10000 series switch represents a new category of data centre switches that combines best-of-breed Aruba data centre l2/3 switching with the industry’s only, fully programmable DPU (Pensando Elba) to deliver stateful software-defined services inline, at scale, with wire-rate performance and orders of magnitude scale and performance improvements over traditional data centre l2/3 switches at a fraction of their TCO.

“Aruba and Pensando have enabled the industry’s first distributed services architecture that allows enterprises to create and operate network infrastructures that perform and scale just like the hyperscale infrastructure giants,” said Alan Weckel, Founder and Technology Analyst at 650 Group. “we believe this is an emerging industry category, distinguished from all others, that will grow over time. New and emerging workloads like AI/ML will drive the ecosystem towards comparable solutions based on innovative, distributed services principles.”

The Aruba CX 10000 series switch with Pensando provides an entirely new class of switching solution to overcome the limitations of legacy architectures. The Aruba CX 10000 will allow operators to extend industry standard leaf-spine networking with stateful distributed micro-segmentation, east-west firewalling, NAT, encryption, and telemetry services – all delivered inline, all the time, on every access port, closer to where critical enterprise applications run.

The solution delivers a unique blend of performance, scale and automation for distributing advanced networking and security services where it is impractical and costly to force traffic back and forth across the network to a centralized policy enforcement point. Instead, enterprises can now simply apply these services at the network access layer edge where the applications are running. Key initial use cases include:

“We are excited that Aruba has brought the distributed services approach to the next level by elevating it from the server to the top-of-rack networking layer,” said John Galatea, Vice President of Sales at Dasher Technologies, an Aruba platinum partner. “we believe our clients will benefit from the enhanced granular security and visibility provided by the Aruba CX 10000 while optimising network and infrastructure resources. This architecture allows our clients to overcome the limitations of legacy solutions by moving security closer to where applications and workloads are being processed.”

“Today’s announcement further extends the partnership between HPE and Pensando – by incorporating distributed services from Pensando into the industry-leading Aruba switching platform, the elimination of legacy technologies needed to build a zero-trust private cloud has never been easier or more cost-effective,” said Prem Jain, CEO at Pensando Systems. “I look forward to continuing our relationship and to bringing additional solutions to market.”

As part of the joint relationship, Pensando also gains access to HPE’s vast patent portfolio through its defensive patent purchase program.