HPE and Arista expand data center partnership
HPE will extend its relationship Arista Networks in a bid to advance its strategy of providing hybrid IT solutions built on its software-defined data center infrastructure portfolio.
The extended partnership will see HPE offer its customers and partners the ability to purchase Arista Networks switching products directly from HPE, starting November 2016.
According to Antonio Neri, executive vice president and general manager, Enterprise Group for Hewlett Packard Enterprise, says the tighter alliance between the two companies is a step up from the existing relationship announced last June, that will see HPE and Arista build application workload reference architectures as part of the HPE Converged Architecture ecosystem.
"Software-defined networking continues to gain market traction as an innovative architectural model capable of enabling automated provisioning, network virtualisation, and network programmability for data centers at cloud-providers and enterprise networks," Neri says.
"Although SDN initially found favour in hyper-scale data centers and at large-scale cloud service providers, it is also winning adoption in a growing number of enterprise data centers across a broad range of vertical markets," he explains.
"HPE and Arista share a common vision around the need to deliver secure hybrid IT solutions and experiences built on industry-leading software-defined infrastructure - helping customers to operate their workloads with speed and agility to grow their business," says Neri.
"This partnership will provide our customers with best of breed networking solutions that are superior to legacy networking solutions and that are complementary to our HPE Data Center Infrastructure Group (DCIG) solutions including HPE compute, storage, virtualisation and cloud offerings," he says.
Neri says adding Arista to its current product lines will expand its ability to address a wider variety of data center networking customer use cases and requirements.
"HPE continues to invest in and position our existing solutions in the specific segments they serve best – namely traditional data centers (FlexFabric) and white box, enterprise and service providers data centers (Altoline)," he explains.
Neri says Arista will be HPE's preferred networking partner in data center networking as an infrastructure foundation for HPE's software-defined infrastructure solutions.
"Together – HPE and Arista are uniquely positioned to help organisations transition to a software-defined data center through innovations that enable network automation," says Neri.
"Augmenting our HPE Data Center Infrastructure Group (DCIG) portfolio with Arista networking enables HPE to offer highly differentiated solutions that create impactful business outcomes for our customers.
