Aruba outs ESP "intelligent edge" cloud-native platform

Santa Clara, Calif. — (BUSINESS WIRE) — Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company (NYSE: HPE), today introduced Aruba ESP (Edge Services Platform), the industry’s first AI-powered, cloud-native platform that predicts and resolves problems at the network edge before they happen.

Built on AIOps, Zero Trust network security, and a Unified Infrastructure for campus, data center, branch and remote worker locations, Aruba ESP delivers an automated, all-in-one platform that continuously analyzes data across domains, ensures SLAs, identifies anomalies and self-optimizes, while seeing and securing unknown devices on the network.

Aruba ESP is designed to deliver a cloud experience at the edge and can be consumed either as a service in the cloud or on-premises, as a managed service delivered through Aruba partners, or via network as a service through HPE GreenLake. Tailored for varying economic requirements, customers may also procure it with flexible financing options via HPE Financial Services.

Utilizing unstructured data at the edge requires a network that leverages AI via network telemetry to process that data at a rate and volume beyond what’s possible at human scale. It also requires an infrastructure with an AI-powered “sixth sense” that proactively identifies impending issues, recommends an accurate resolution and leverages automation to turn that into logical actions, all without manual intervention.

Through continued analysis of network, user, and device insights, Aruba ESP turns information into knowledge, helping organizations accelerate transformation and maintain business continuity via a single, cloud-native platform that can reside either on-premises or in the cloud, and secures and unifies the infrastructure across the enterprise built on the following core principles:

AIOps is the critical component of Aruba ESP, which uses AI and analytics to identify exact root causes with greater than 95% accuracy, auto-remediate network issues, proactively monitor the user experience, tune the network to prevent problems before they occur, and use peer benchmarking and prescriptive recommendations to continuously optimize and secure the network. In a live customer deployment, using AIOps resulted in a 15% increase in throughput capacity and reduced issue resolution time by nearly 90%, ultimately resulting in a vastly improved end user and IT experience.

Unified Infrastructure consolidates all network operations for switching, Wi-Fi and SD-WAN across campus, data center, branch, and remote worker environments under Aruba Central, a cloud-native, single-pane-of-glass console that correlates cross-domain events to reduce issue resolution time and manual errors. In addition, Aruba’s unified infrastructure approach provides customers with a choice between controller services on-premises or in the cloud, delivering maximum flexibility at enterprise scale.

Zero Trust Network Security combines built-in role-based access technology, Dynamic Segmentation and identity-based intrusion detection to authenticate, authorize and control every user and device connecting to the network, while still detecting, preventing, isolating and stopping attacks before they impact the business.

New Innovations Within Aruba ESP

Aruba ESP is the industry’s most scalable, full-stack, cloud-native platform for wired, wireless and SD-WAN environments that unifies multiple network elements for centralized management and control. Aruba ESP is based on open standards and enables integration with a variety of third-party solutions and services. Significant innovations introduced today include:

Cloud-native management for any size enterprise – Aruba Central currently runs mission critical networks for over 65,000 customers and now with new ArubaOS services, it is the industry’s only controllerless, cloud-based platform to provide full-stack management and operations for wired, wireless and SD-WAN infrastructure of any size across campus, data center, branch, and remote worker locations to be consumed on-premises or in the cloud.

Simplified daily operations with unified infrastructure – With access to a common data lake via Aruba ESP, the latest version of Aruba Central has been enhanced with simplified navigation, advanced search, and contextual views to present multiple dimensions of information through a single point-of-control, virtually eliminating the need for disparate tools to collect and correlate information across numerous domains and locations.

Reduced resolution time with AI and automation – Aruba has a proven track record of bringing AI-powered innovations to market, including unique technologies like Aruba AirMatch. Based on modeling data from over one million network devices generating over 1.5B data points per day, Aruba’s new AI Insights reduces troubleshooting time by identifying hard-to-see network configuration issues and providing root-cause, prescriptive recommendations and automated remediation to continuously optimize network operations.

AI-powered IT Efficiencies—Aruba Central now offers AI Search, a Natural Language Processing data discovery service that enables IT teams to eliminate “swivel chair” investigations by using simple, English language queries to extract comprehensive user and device information from Aruba ESP’s common data lake to present relevant information in context to quickly resolve a problem. For more complex issues, AI Assist uses event-driven automation to collect and post all the relevant data for both the internal help desk and Aruba Technical Assistance Center (TAC).

Granular visibility across applications, devices and the network – Enhancements to Aruba Central enable user-centric analytics from User Experience Insight to identify client, application, and network performance issues faster.

Extension of next-gen switching to distributed and mid-size enterprises – To help organizations accelerate Edge transformation, Aruba has expanded its CX Switch portfolio to include the Aruba CX 6200 Switch Series. This new series brings built-in analytics and automation capabilities to every network edge where user and device connectivity occurs, generating insights that can be applied to informing better business outcomes. The CX 6200 switch series further expands Aruba’s end-to-end CX switching portfolio, enabling customers to run a single operating model from the enterprise campus and branch access layer to the data center.

Ongoing innovation with new Developer Hub – Aruba is introducing the Developer Hub, a comprehensive resource for developers that includes Aruba APIs and documentation to streamline the development of innovative, next-generation edge applications leveraging the open Aruba ESP platform.

To address the varying business and technical requirements of organizations looking to harness the power of the Intelligent Edge, Aruba has expanded its consumption and procurement options. These include network as a service through HPE GreenLake or customers can procure Aruba ESP with flexible financing options via HPE Financial Services. For example, customers can acquire the technology they need today and pay only 1% of the total contract value each month for the first eight months, deferring over 90% of the cost until 2021.

Additional Resources