Aruba introduces industry’s first Distributed Services Switch

Aruba has introduced the industry’s first Distributed Services Switch enabling enterprises to deploy software-defined stateful services where data is created and processed, eliminating legacy appliances and host software needed to build the hybrid clouds demanded by modern applications and IT organizations.

The Aruba CX 10000 Series Switch represents a new category of data center switches that combines best-of-breed Aruba data center L2/3 switching with the industry’s only, fully programmable DPU (Pensando Elba) to deliver stateful software-defined services inline, at scale, with wire-rate performance and orders of magnitude scale and performance improvements over traditional data center L2/3 switches at a fraction of their TCO.

The Aruba CX 10000 Series Switch represents a new category of data center switches that combines best-of-breed Aruba data center L2/3 switching with the industry’s only, fully programmable DPU (Pensando Elba) to deliver stateful software-defined services inline, at scale, with wire-rate performance and orders of magnitude scale and performance improvements over traditional data center L2/3 switches at a fraction of their TCO.

Moving to a New, Distributed Services Architecture

The Aruba CX 10000 Series Switch with Pensando provides an entirely new class of switching solution to overcome the limitations of legacy architectures. The Aruba CX 10000 will allow operators to extend industry standard leaf-spine networking with stateful distributed microsegmentation, east-west firewalling, NAT, encryption, and telemetry services – all delivered inline, all the time, on every access port, closer to where critical enterprise applications run.

The solution delivers a unique blend of performance, scale and automation for distributing advanced networking and security services where it is impractical and costly to force traffic back and forth across the network to a centralized policy enforcement point. Instead, enterprises can now simply apply these services at the network access layer edge where the applications are running. Key initial use cases include:

• On-premises Enterprise Data Centers and Private Cloud
Traditional data center architectures with centralized, hardware-based security appliances are being pushed to their breaking point – imposing performance, agility, and cost burdens that are not sustainable. The Aruba CX 10000 delivers a compelling architecture to distribute advanced services to the data center edge with unified network and security automation and policy management. This new solution optimizes network bandwidth and performance by not having to hair-pin local traffic to a centralized chokepoint, helping improve security posture while limiting appliance sprawl, complexity and cost.

• Co-location Edge – Securely Interconnecting Cloud Providers The cost of encrypting access to the public cloud using traditional appliances is exorbitant. Many customers have a compliance mandate to encrypt all access to public cloud resources. The Aruba CX 10000 provides edge routing, line-rate encryption, firewall and NAT, with end-to-end telemetry for public cloud dedicated connections from either on-premises or co-location data centers. This solution radically lowers the total cost of ownership, provides an optimized security architecture and reduces an organization’s IT blast radius and risk.

Aruba ESP (Edge Services Platform) was designed to unify, automate and secure all network edge services across domains including remote, branch, campus and data center. The Aruba CX 10000 helps customers expand a Zero Trust Network Architecture deeper into the data center, to the network-server edge, delivering 800G E-W Stateful Services across every switch port, dramatically scaling and strengthening the security of critical applications and workloads.

Extending the HPE/Pensando Relationship
This new solution complements the previously announced Pensando Distributed Services
Platform (DSP) for HPE Servers, delivered as a factory option in 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, addressing a wider range of use cases including brownfield deployments or infrastructure agnostic/heterogeneous environments to complement or augment SmartNIC deployments.
As part of the joint relationship, Pensando also gains access to HPE’s vast patent portfolio through its Defensive Patent Purchase Program.

Pricing and Availability
The Aruba CX 10000 will be generally available in January 2022 with pricing starting at $45,000 USD which will include accelerated Stateful Firewall, Zero Trust Segmentation, ERSPAN, Telemetry, and DDoS protection.

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