Aruba HPE Expands CX Data Center/Campus switch Lineup — Intros Fabric Composer

tAruba HPE has taken a forward thinking approach to data centers and virtualized infrastructure while rounding out its solutions.  Extending Greenlake into the campus and extending Aruba into the data center.

The company this week has added new entrants to its family of CX Ethernet switches for Leaf and Spine network deployments in addition to advanced management and automation capabilities from its new Fabric Composer to address the modern problems of data centers.

According to Aruba, data centers have becomecenters of data, meaning that application support and workloads are much more dynamic than in the past and can be situated at the edge, within traditional data centers, or in the cloud. Thus Aruba’s new CX switch entrants are now available in smaller and more flexible form factors, such as a 12 port collapsed compute core or small spine switch addressing smaller data centers on campuses . The new CX 8360 switch models offer a unique form factor for right sized environments. The flexibility enables customers to pair redundant 12 port switches to connect leafs.  We view this class of product as an area of growth as enterprises deploy many different edge models that rely on smaller data center footprints distributed in campuses and various different edges.

Aruba HPE now helps infrastructure and network operations teams to automate fabric provisioning for sped up network deployment, while minimizing repetitive tasks through workload orchestration.  Aruba has announced its fabric composer, with technology stemming from its earlier acquisition of software defined player Plexxi.

The new Fabric Composer is a significant piece for data centers to operate at scale, putting Aruba HPE in much better position against its core competitors, namely Cisco and Dell.  The Aruba approach to its fabric composer was to keep it both lightweight and simple. The composer allows enterprises to streamline network operations, while handling virtualized workloads/VXLANs, all while minimizing manual configuration tasks.

Aruba’s latest data center enhancements complement the work that has already accomplished, namely Aruba’s single pane of glass management, its Cloud Central, ESP  with AIOPs to predict problems across the network using AI, and its existing network customization and configuration tool sets, e.g. Net Edit.