HPE expands AI capabilities in Aruba Networking Central

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has announced the expansion of its AI-powered network management solution, HPE Aruba Networking Central.

This initiative introduces new AI insights and capabilities, including the integration of OpsRamp for third-party network device monitoring involving industry vendors like Cisco, Juniper Networks and Palo Alto Networks.

The newly enhanced platform, HPE Aruba Networking Central, includes an improved network device configuration engine, extended network observability, and AI-generated network optimisations. These components aim to leverage AI insights gathered from an expanding customer base to enhance network management, security, performance, and visibility.

David Hughes, Chief Product Officer at HPE Aruba Networking, emphasised the significance of the upgrades. "HPE Aruba Networking Central accelerates AI Networking with next generation cloud-native management, built to improve network automation with AI-powered insights, both now and in the future as customer needs evolve," he commented. "Our notable expansion of AI-powered insights for networking and security visibility into a wide range of industry vendors offers a huge advantage in their ability to control, predict, and manage their network, putting them in a position to execute their AI Networking strategies."

Acquired by HPE in 2023, OpsRamp enhances HPE Aruba Networking Central's network observability by providing insights from a variety of network devices including wireless access points, switches, firewalls, and routers from numerous vendors. This integration aims to reduce network blind spots and facilitates common health monitoring and troubleshooting tasks.

The platform's Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) capabilities have been further enriched with the integration of HPE Aruba Networking User Experience Insight (UXI) monitoring into its interface. Combined with HPE Aruba Networking UXI sensors, this feature allows for continuous monitoring of service level agreement (SLA) adherence, spanning from the user to the application from a singular interface.

In a bid to streamline network configurations at a larger scale, HPE Aruba Networking Central now includes a common configuration model across various HPE Aruba Networking products, such as wired, wireless, and gateway devices. Additional enhancements include new hierarchical configurations capabilities and the introduction of 90 new APIs.

Keven McCammon, Global Head of Digital Infrastructure Services at Henkel Corporation, expressed anticipation for the benefits these advancements will bring. "Deploying, upgrading and patching a global network is complex and time consuming," said McCammon. "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."

These improvements are supported by a threefold increase in AI-trained models over the past six months, a measure aimed at significantly reducing the time and effort needed for planning, deploying, managing, troubleshooting, and optimising networks. The newly trained and refined classification AI models are derived from a data lake containing telemetry from over 4.6 million network-managed devices and more than 1.6 billion unique customer endpoints, reflecting substantial growth in 2024.

Earlier this year, HPE Aruba Networking expanded its AIOps network management features by incorporating generative AI (GenAI) Large Language Models (LLMs) into HPE Aruba Networking Central. Additionally, HPE introduced new AI-powered security observability and monitoring features to tackle IoT security risks, alongside launching behavioural analytics-based network detection and response (NDR) capabilities.

HPE Aruba Networking Central is offered as a cloud-scale network management solution sold as a SaaS product and through an HPE GreenLake for Networking subscription available on the HPE GreenLake platform. Public preview of the AI Networking capabilities will commence in October 2024, with third-party monitoring, UXI integration, and selected device configuration features included in the preview by the end of the year.