HPE expands AI-powered automation, introduces monitoring for third-party devices and end-user experience from HPE Aruba Networking Central
Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced the expansion of HPE Aruba Networking Central, its security-first, AI-powered network management solution, with new AI insights and capabilities that include integration of OpsRamp for third-party network device monitoring of industry vendors such as Cisco, Juniper Networks, and Palo Alto Networks.
New capabilities of HPE Aruba Networking Central also include an improved network device configuration engine, expanded network observability, and AI-generated network optimisations, powered by AI insights from a rapidly growing customer base.
“HPE Aruba Networking Central is advancing AI Networking with new next-generation capabilities, built to enhance network automation with AI-powered insights,” said David Hughes, chief product officer, HPE Aruba Networking. “We are expanding our AI-powered insights for networking and security to cover products from a wide range of industry vendors, offering customers a huge advantage in their ability to control, predict, and manage their network, putting them in a strong position to execute their AI Networking strategies.”
Acquired by HPE in 2023, OpsRamp increases HPE Aruba Networking Central’s contextual network observability by adding insights from network devices such as wireless access points, switches, firewalls, and routers across a comprehensive range of vendors. This new option helps reduce heterogenous network blind spots and accelerates common health monitoring and troubleshooting tasks.
HPE Aruba Networking Central’s Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) capabilities have also been expanded with the integration of HPE Aruba Networking User Experience Insight (UXI) monitoring natively into its interface. When combined with HPE Aruba Networking UXI sensors, this capability continuously monitors service level agreement (SLA) adherence from the user to the application from a single pane of glass.
To further streamline network configurations at scale, HPE Aruba Networking Central’s device management includes the addition of a common configuration model across HPE Aruba Networking wired, wireless, and gateway products, new hierarchical configurations capabilities, and 90 new APIs.
“Deploying, upgrading and patching a global network is complex and time consuming,” said Keven McCammon, Global Head of Digital Infrastructure Services at Henkel Corporation. “With the latest version of HPE Aruba Networking Central we look forward to increased automation that reduces our deployment windows across 400+ sites from weeks to hours.”
“Networks of today are increasingly complex with an influx of customer interactions, IoT devices, AI data, and security threats. IT teams are being asked to do more with less and need network automation solutions that assure service integrity and accelerate troubleshooting,” asserts Mark Leary, research director, network observability and automation for IDC. “With the integration of third-party monitoring in HPE Aruba Networking Central, customers can gain essential insights across their end-to-end network infrastructure and promote a more unified and streamlined approach to network management. Contextual network observability is essential in this hyper-connected digital era. It enables network teams to work smarter, heighten resource efficiency, and deliver more value with the resources they have.”
All of the aforementioned improvements will be further enhanced with three times more AI trained models added over the last six months that significantly reduce the time and effort to plan, deploy, manage, troubleshoot and optimize networks. Newly trained and tuned classification AI models are now derived from a data lake with telemetry from more than 4.6 million network-managed devices and more than 1.6 billion unique customer endpoints, marking an exponential growth in 2024.
Earlier this year, HPE Aruba Networking announced the expansion of its AIOps network management capabilities by integrating multiple generative AI (GenAI) Large Language Models (LLMs) within HPE Aruba Networking Central. In 2024, HPE also introduced new AI-powered security observability and monitoring features with HPE Aruba Networking Central to help address IoT security risks, in addition to the launch of behavioral analytics-based network detection and response (NDR) capabilities, also delivered by HPE Aruba Networking Central.
HPE Aruba Networking Central is a cloud-scale network management solution sold as a SaaS and also included as part of an HPE GreenLake for Networking (NaaS) subscription available through the HPE GreenLake platform. AI Networking capabilities will be available in public preview starting October 2024. Third-party monitoring, UXI integration and select device configuration capabilities will be added to the public preview prior to year-end 2024.
