Aruba ESP: Cloud-Native Platform Built for the Intelligent Network Edge

Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, has introduced Aruba ESP (Edge Services Platform). This AI-powered, cloud-native technology platform helps predict and resolve 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. It 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.

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

• AIOps – This 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.
• 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.

“Built upon Aruba’s guiding principles of connect, protect, analyze, and act, Aruba ESP is the culmination of years of innovation, R&D, Aruba ingenuity and, most importantly, input from our valued customers,” said Keerti Melkote, president of Aruba.

“The Intelligent Edge is the catalyst that will spark limitless possibilities for organizations and enterprises that want to accelerate transformation and ensure business continuity by leveraging their technology investments as their greatest asset,” said Keerti Melkote, president of Aruba. “Built upon Aruba’s guiding principles of connect, protect, analyze, and act, Aruba ESP is the culmination of years of innovation, R&D, Aruba ingenuity and, most importantly, input from our valued customers whose honest feedback and insightful perspective has helped to make this platform a network that knows.”

New Innovations Within Aruba ESP

As a scalable, full-stack, cloud-native platform for wired, wireless and SD-WAN environments, Aruba ESP would unift 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 would 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 a 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 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 would reduce 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. It would enable 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.