Focusing on next-generation switching architecture, Aruba launches industry's first distributed services switch

Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE: HPE) company, today introduced the industry’s first distributed services switch, enabling enterprises to deploy software-defined stateful services where data is generated and processed, eliminating the traditional appliances and host software required to build hybrid clouds for modern applications and IT organizations.

“The transforming market creates new opportunities for disruption, and as cloud and edge converge, distributed services are disrupting everything from AI/ML to 5G and virtualization,” said John Chambers, Chairman of Pensando, CEO of JC2 Ventures, and former CEO of Cisco Systems. “As a new generation of network equipment, Pensando’s silicon-based software-based distributed service switches enable enterprises to deploy distributed services that were once only available to hyperscalers such as AWS in a simpler and more economical way. By eliminating traditional equipment and host software, enterprises can deliver 100 times the scale and 10 times the performance at only one-third the total cost of ownership of traditional approaches.”

Aruba CX 10000 series switches are a new generation of high-performance data center switches, combining the best-in-class Aruba data center L2/3 switches with the industry's only fully programmable DPU (Pensando Elba) to provide state-based software-defined services in an inline, large-scale manner. Its scale and performance are far higher than traditional data center L2/3 switches, but the total cost of ownership is only a fraction of L2/3 switches.

(Aruba CX 10000 Series Switches)

“Aruba and Pensando have developed the industry’s first distributed services architecture that enables enterprises to create and operate network infrastructure that rivals the performance and scale of the hyperscale infrastructure giants,” said Alan Weckel, founder and technology analyst at 650 Group. “We believe this space is an emerging technology area distinct from all others and will continue to evolve over time. Emerging workloads like AI/ML will drive the ecosystem toward solutions based on innovative, distributed services principles.”

Rethinking today’s web services model

While data center networks have evolved over the past decade to deliver higher performance 25/100/400G leaf-spine network topologies to address the volume and velocity of emerging application architectures, security and service architectures have not kept pace.

With the explosive growth of east-west traffic in data centers, centralized security appliances have proven to be inefficient, costly, and difficult to manage. In short, concentrating traffic on devices located at the edge of the data center comes with severe performance, cost, and operational penalties.

The problem is further exacerbated by microservices-based applications, where traffic can move between services without ever leaving the physical host. This means that some application traffic may never be inspected by hardware firewalls, IPS or other security devices, leaving the enterprise vulnerable to attacks from within.

Moving to a new distributed service architecture

The Aruba CX 10000 series switches with Pensando technology offer a new class of switch solutions to overcome the limitations of traditional architectures. The Aruba CX 10000 will allow operators to extend industry-standard leaf-spine network topologies with stateful distributed micro-segmentation, east-west firewall, NAT, encryption, and telemetry services. And all of these services are always provided inline on each access port, closer to where the enterprise's critical applications are running.

(Aruba CX 10000 Series Switches)

It is often impractical and costly to force traffic back and forth through the network to a central policy enforcement point. The CX 10000 solution provides a unique combination of performance, scale and automation for distributing advanced network and security services, so that enterprises can now simply apply these services at the edge network access layer where applications are running. Key initial use cases include:

• Local Data Centers and Private Clouds <br /> Traditional data center architectures with centralized, hardware-based security appliances are reaching their limits and cannot sustain high performance, agility, and cost burdens. The Aruba CX 10000 offers a compelling architecture that distributes advanced services to the edge of the data center through unified network and security automation and policy management. This new solution eliminates the need to send local traffic to a central inspection point, optimizing network bandwidth and performance, and limiting device expansion, complexity, and cost while improving security posture.

• Co-located Edge – Securely interconnect cloud providers <br /> Accessing the public cloud using traditional equipment encryption is too expensive, and many customers are forced by regulations to encrypt all access to public cloud resources. The Aruba CX 10000 provides edge routing, wire-speed encryption, firewall and NAT, and end-to-end telemetry for dedicated connections to the public cloud from local or co-located data centers. This solution fundamentally reduces overall costs, optimizes security architecture, and reduces the scope and risk of IT downtime for organizations.

Aruba ESP (Edge Services Platform) is designed to unify, automate and protect all cross-domain network edge services, including remote, branch, campus and data center. Aruba CX 10000 can help customers extend the zero-trust network architecture rooted in the data center to the edge of the network server, providing 800G east-west stateful services on each switch port, thereby greatly expanding and strengthening the security of critical applications and workloads.

“We are excited that Aruba is taking its distributed services approach to the next level, extending from the server to the top-of-rack network layer,” said John Galatea, vice president of sales at Dasher Technologies, an Aruba Platinum partner. “We are confident that customers will benefit from the enhanced granular security and visibility provided by the Aruba CX 10000 while optimizing network and infrastructure resources. This architecture enables customers to overcome the limitations of traditional solutions and move security closer to where applications and workloads run.”

HPE and Pensando expand partnership

This new solution complements the company’s previously announced Pensando Distributed Services Platform (DSP) for HPE Servers, which is a factory option for HPE ProLiant servers, HPE Apollo systems and HPE Edgeline Converged Edge Systems.

The Aruba CX 10000 extends the implementation of these intelligent services into the data center network fabric, creating a wider range of use cases, including hybrid deployments or infrastructure agnostic/heterogeneous environments, to complement or enhance SmartNIC deployments.

“This release further expands the partnership between HPE and Pensando by integrating Pensando’s distributed services into the industry-leading Aruba switching platform, making it easier and more cost-effective to build a zero-trust private cloud without legacy technology,” said Prem Jain, CEO of Pensando Systems. “I look forward to continuing to work together on additional solutions.”

The partnership also enables Pensando to use HPE's extensive patent portfolio through its "defensive patent acquisition program."