Aruba Makes ESP Advancements to Keep Up with Changing Business Requirements

ARUBA ATMOSPHERE —  Aruba (an HPE company) has made significant upgrades to Aruba ESP (Edge Services Platform). These advancements include new functionality in Aruba Central to give organizations the ability to keep pace with rapidly changing business requirements. 

The news comes in conjunction with Aruba’s Atmosphere ‘22 conference in Las Vegas. Channel Futures is there.

Aruba Central NetConductor

The new Aruba Central NetConductor aims to allow enterprises to centralize the management of distributed networks with cloud-native services. These are services that simplify policy provisioning and automate network configurations in wired, wireless, and WAN infrastructures. Central NetConductor enables a more agile network while enforcing zero trust and SASE security policies. 

Aruba’s Larry Lunetta

“Aruba is introducing new network modernization solutions built on Aruba ESP,” said Larry Lunetta, vice president of solutions portfolio marketing at Aruba. “Aruba Central NetConductor is the first cloud-native, standards-based solution that delivers a unified network overlay (fabric) across wired, wireless, and WAN infrastructure at global scale. This enables network professionals to automate fabric configuration and management with workflows tied to business intent. It also enables implementation of identity-based security that is enforced in-line by the network infrastructure. This is foundational for zero trust and SASE architectures.”

Self-Locating Indoor Access Points

Aruba also revealed self-locating indoor access points (APs) with built-in GPS receivers and Open Locate. These are a proposed new industry standard for sharing location information from an access point to a device.

“The new self-locating access points that include GPS receivers are revolutionizing location applications,” said Lunetta. “They do this by filling in the final gap in indoor location data by using the fixed location framework of GPS to accurately anchor location reference points and eliminate manually induced errors.”

Traditional approaches, such as Bluetooth ranging, do not have a fixed frame of reference and use manual mapping, according to Lunetta. So the data is less accurate, often by multiple meters. With one meter or less accuracy, GPS-based location data opens up new applications such as wireless access points self-locating on a map and now makes practical line-of-business solutions such as wayfinding, asset tracking and space utilization.

Benefits to Partners

These innovations, along with Aruba’s network-as-a-service (NaaS) offerings, will benefit their partners and the channel in terms of business requirements. They will do this in three significant ways, allowing them to: 

• Tap into customer strategic digital acceleration and network modernization initiatives with new, unique solutions.
• Build a recurring revenue stream by accelerating customer migration to the cloud.
• Deliver additional services to help customers adopt new technologies and provide them in a NaaS offering.

The need for more agile, flexible networks has been mounting, driven by the digital transformation accelerated by the pandemic. 

Aruba’s cloud-native services deal with the complexity of multi-generational architectures with their attendant operations. They also deal with security challenges. Traditional VLAN-based architectures require significant manual configuration and integration; therefore, they are slow to adapt to new business connectivity requirements, causing potential security gaps, the company said.

A modern, agile network closes this gap. It employs a network overlay that seamlessly stitches together existing VLAN segments with cloud-native policy and configuration services. This enables users and devices to make secure and reliable connections from anywhere. To help customers accelerate digital transformation initiatives, Central NetConductor uses AI for management and optimization. It also implements business-intent workflows to automate network configuration, and extends Aruba’s built-in security with …