HPE enriches AI capabilities of Aruba Networking Central

Hewlett Packard Enterprise has expanded its HPE Aruba Networking Central artificial intelligence (AI)-powered network management solution with AI insights and capabilities.

The expansions include integration of OpsRamp for monitoring third-party network device monitoring of industry vendors such as Cisco, Juniper Networks, and Palo Alto Networks.

Other key new capabilities of HPE Aruba Networking Central include an improved network device configuration engine, expanded network observability, and AI-generated network optimisations, powered by AI insights from a “growing customer base”.

HPE Aruba Networking Central is a cloud-scale network management SaaS and is 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, user experience insight (UXI) integration and select device configuration capabilities will be added to the public preview prior to the end of 2024.

HPE Aruba Networking Central’s digital experience monitoring (DEM) capabilities have also been expanded with the integration of HPE Aruba Networking 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 centralised point. 

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 application programming interfaces (APIs).

Acquired by HPE in 2023, OpsRamp is designed to increase 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.

The tech provider believes that the new option will help to reduce heterogenous network blind spots and to accelerate common health monitoring and troubleshooting tasks.

HPE said that all of the aforementioned improvements will be further enhanced with three times more AI-trained models added over the past six months that significantly reduce the time and effort to plan, deploy, manage, troubleshoot and optimise 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 what is said to be “exponential” growth in 2024.

HPE Aruba Networking chief product officer David Hughes said: “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.

“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.”

Keven McCammon, global head of digital infrastructure services at HPE Aruba Networking Central user Henkel Corporation, added: “Deploying, upgrading and patching a global network is complex and time consuming. With the latest version of [the solution], we look forward to increased automation that reduces our deployment windows across 400+ sites from weeks to hours.”

Earlier in 2024, HPE Aruba Networking expanded its AIOps network management capabilities by integrating multiple generative AI (GenAI) large language models (LLMs) within HPE Aruba Networking Central.

It also introduced AI-powered security observability and monitoring features with HPE Aruba Networking Central to help address IoT security risks, in addition to the launch of behavioural analytics-based network detection and response (NDR) capabilities, also delivered by HPE Aruba Networking Central.