Aruba Atmosphere 2023 Recep

Another successful year at Aruba Atmosphere conference at The Venetian Resort Las Vegas.  If you were not able to attend or watch the keynotes, Laketec has you covered.  Here are the highlights from this year’s conference.

Aruba Central:

• • Interface – completely revamped interface in Aruba Central

    • Solar system for navigation & dashboard – blended health views
    • Sunburst view

  • Time Travel – New feature which allows Aruba Central to go back to a specific point in time to get a correlated snapshot of the entire network at that time. This can drastically simplify troubleshooting.

    • Allows for 7 day playback with 1 min granularity

  • VMware integration – Represent VNIC’s (virtual networks) in network topologies and other views to simplify troubleshooting
  • Updated Experience View– blended elements to provide full picture, connectivity, infrastructure, app performance into 1 view
  • Redesigned alerting view – Alerting now provides BOLEAN, Threshold based & AI based alerts into a single alerting view. Alerts are formatted to include root cause, recommendation, and impact.
  • Behavioral analysis – Central can now better understand if devices are IOT based or human managed device (using classification & profiling).
  • Guided setup for underlays – New guided setup for underlay orchestration which can be paired with existing overlay orchestration to drastically simplify network deployments.
  • Configuration Hierarchy – New configuration hierarchy provides added flexibility for administrators and a bridge from AOS8 to Central.

    • Configuration scopes (global, site collections, sites, devices, device groups)

  • Common Configuration – Assign policy & configuration for Switches, AP’s and gateways from a single UI. Central will handle syntax translations per device to deploy a change across different Model and Type of hardware. Example: Deploy VLAN to AP, Switch, Gateway simultaneously without knowing the syntax of each.

CX Switching:

• • Hot patching – Allows installation of updates/patches without requiring a reboot of the switch. 
  • Enhanced software upgrades (ESU) for CX6300: 

    • New features which removes the need to reboot a full VSF stack during a software upgrade. 
    • It uses existing redundant management and hot-patching functionality keep members running and only requires the conductor to reboot at the end of the upgrade cycle.
    • Similar to ISSU in the 6400 series

  • CX Edge Insights – New on-box application recognition feature providing client telemetries and app visibility using DPI, IPFIX, and traffic insights.  

    • Supported on CX 6300 & 6400.

  • CX 8100 Series – New addition to the CX data center portfolio. CX 8100 is a 1/10Gb switch designed for smaller campus aggregation and data center top of rack applications.

Data center:

• • Aruba CX 10000 distributed services platform (DSP):

    • Can now handle IPSEC natively (in addition to stateful firewall, NAT, etc.)
    • Demo showing IPSEC between data centers running at 200Gb. 
    • Will support 1000 IPsec tunnels in the future.

Wireless:

• • AP 600 series:

    • Wi-Fi 6E portfolio now complete
    • 610 series
    • 605R – microbranch AP

      • Modular cellular radio

    • 503R – compact or entry level micro branch AP for small office / home office

  • AOS10:

    • Now generally available
    • New AirGroup features for custom services and wired devices
    • Simplified IOT onboarding via device provisioning via DPP

EdgeConnect SD-WAN:

• • 9114 Gateway – New gateway for larger branches or smaller campuses
  • 10104 EdgeConnect Appliance – compact fanless design for small locations such as retail

    • Includes Next gen firewall, MPLS, 5G/LTE, 500Mbps bandwidth, USB for other LTE interfaces

Security:

• • AXIS Acquisition – HPE entered into an agreement to acquire AXIS, a secure services edge (SSE) provider. 

    • Goal is to add AXIS capabilities to existing EdgeConnect SD-WAN portfolio to provide a complete SASE solution.
    • Aruba will continue to foster integrations with existing 3rd party providers like Zscaler, etc. but can now offer a single vendor option as well to simplify the operator experience. 
    • Key Capabilities:

      • Secure web gateway
      • ZTNA (zero trust network access)
      • CASB (cloud access security broker)

User Experience:

• • New UXI Endpoint Agents:

    • User experience monitoring across mobile devices & endpoint devices.
    • Supports Windows, MacOS, IOS, and Android
    • Measure Wi-Fi, Roaming and App experience on the device itself
    • UXI App on device can help users quickly understand issues and provide more details to IT admins.

  • Unified App intelligence:

    • Synchronize your app identities & risk level across all of your devices – Stored in Aruba Central.

  • App Express:

    • Use real-time experience data to select the best WAN path for each application.
    • Supports both internal and external apps

IOT: 

• • Device Provisioning Protocol (DPP):

    • DPP provides hardware level security identities allowing secure, zero touch onboarding for IOT devices 
    • DPP Added it to latest version of Aruba Central
    • DPP has been added directly into Aruba UXI sensors, making them the first commercials available DPP powered IOT devices

  • 802.1ar:

    • Open standards based framework for onboarding IOT devices
    • Globally unique crypto based DevID identity
    • Clearpass is able to natively authenticate, validate & profile the devices using 802.1ar.

  • Expanded IOT operations in Central:

    • 2x increase in integrations to 3rd party vendors in last 12 months.
    • In AOS 10, AP’s act as IOT connector

5G: 

• • Athonet Acquisition – HPE Aruba acquired Athonet, a leader in private 5G cellular solutions

    • HPE is excited to integrate Athonet technology into Aruba Central to allows customers to seamlessly manage both Wifi & 5G in a single platform.
    • Cellular & WIFI each have their own unique advantages, Aruba can now supply both to customers.

Greenlake Network As-A-Service (NAAS):

• • Clearpass service pack – New Clearpass service pack allows customers to consume Clearpass as-a-service as part HPE Aruba Greenlake.