Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, 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 organisations.
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 performanceimprovements over traditional data center L2/3 switches at a fraction of their TCO.
While data center networking has evolved over the past decade providing higher performing 25/100/400G leaf-spine topologies to address the volume and velocity of emerging application architectures, security and services architectures have not.
With the explosive growth of east-west traffic in the data center, centralized security appliances are proving inefficient, expensive and difficult to manage. Simply put, hair-pinning traffic to an appliance sitting at the data center edge introduces heavy performance, cost and operational penalties.
This problem is further exacerbated by microservices-based applications, where traffic may not even need to leave a physical host to go from one service to another. This means some application traffic may never be inspected by a hardware firewall, IPS, or other security devices, leaving enterprises vulnerable to attack from within the enterprise itself.
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 centralised policy enforcement point. Instead, enterprises can now simply apply these services at the network access layer edge where the applications are running.
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.
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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