The rising interest in edge computing has been seized upon by cloud providers and telcos, but also by their infrastructure suppliers. HPE’s Aruba division may have started life as an enterprise WLAN vendor, but its role is far more strategic now, as it provides a focal point of its parent’s edge platform offering.
HPE acquired Aruba in 2015, and three years later, HPE CEO Antonio Neri said he would invest $4bn in edge products and services by 2022, giving the acquisition a much enhanced status within the organization.
Aruba has pulled together several existing products and previously announced developments to create a broad-ranging edge management proposition. Its Edge Services Platform (ESP) is a cloud-native system to operate and automate an edge cloud and network, promising predictive maintenance to reduce cost and downtime.
It includes 35 services, coordinated by the Aruba Central network management dashboard, but only supports Aruba’s own equipment – WiFi access points, switches, SD-WAN gateways and so on. ESP can be run on-premise, in the cloud, as a managed service from a third party, or as a network-as-a-service offering through HPE’s GreenLake program.
In addition to services that were already available, ESP introduces what Aruba claims is the only controllerless, cloud-based platform to provide full-stack management and operations for wired, wireless, and SD-WAN infrastructure.
Other enhancements include:
- a more multi-dimensional view of network performance in Aruba Central, informed by AI-assisted modelling of data from more than one million network devices, generating more than 1.5bn data points per day
- a natural language processing discovery service
- deeper visibility into user-centric analytics
- a new developer hub to facilitate the development of third party applications for ESP.
“We’ve automated the cloud to a great degree, but the clouds are big centralized data centers that bring together compute, storage, networking, and create an infrastructure for applications to be built on top of,” said Keerti Melkote, president and founder of Aruba, at the company’s digital conference last week. “The edge is the exact opposite — it is highly distributed, it is all the places that you’re familiar with … The future architectures are going to be edge connected to the cloud and what happens at the edge stays at the edge.”
Aruba ESP is a “piece of software that’s cloud-native, allowing you to highly automate the deployment of your intelligent edges, and then get insights from the data that you’re collecting at the intelligent edge and put that back into action,” he added.