Future of Networking: secure, intelligent networks that are optimized for performance and management

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More from HPE Discover 2024

Phil Mottram

Executive VP & General Manager Intelligent Edge

HPE Aruba Networking

David Hughes

SVP, Chief Product and Technology Officer

HPE Aruba Networking

HPE and Aruba Networking elevate network security with AI-powered 5G and Wi-Fi 7 solutions

Network security took center stage as Atmosphere, Aruba Networking’s annual event, joined forces with HPE Discover 2024, showcasing Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co.’s dedication to integrating Aruba Networking into its advanced AI offerings.Highlighting the latest in network management, Aruba Central introduced innovations in private 5G and Wi-Fi 7, emphasizing AI-driven enhancements for heightened security and efficiency. Leveraging AI tools within their environment ensures accurate recommendations and robust security measures, according to David Hughes (pictured, right), senior vice president and chief product and technology officer at HPE

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Future of Networking: secure, intelligent networks that are optimized for performance and management

Phil Mottram

Executive VP & General Manager Intelligent Edge HPE Aruba Networking

David Hughes

SVP, Chief Product and Technology Officer HPE Aruba Networking

>> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's Live coverage here in Las Vegas for HPE Discover 2024. I'm your host, John Furrier, theCUBE, Dave Vellante, Rebecca Knight, Bob Laliberte is with me with theCUBE Research and getting briefed, doing all the research, having all the meetings. We're here in theCUBE bringing you all the data. I've got a great segment here with Aruba Networking here with HPE, Phil Mottram, Executive Vice President, General Manager, Cube alumni. David Hughes, Chief Product Officer, HPE, Aruba Networking. Gents, thanks for coming back to theCUBE. Great to see you guys.

>> Yeah, likewise. Good to see you.

>> First of all, congratulations on all the great announcements. HP Discover a lot of great action, networking a big part of the action, and Atmosphere part of the show. Congratulations. Give us the highlights.

>> Yeah, I mean, look, normally Atmosphere is our network only show, if that makes sense. And yeah, this year we've put it as part of Discover. We thought that made a lot of sense because the world of AI, the network is becoming more important. We wanted our networking audience to understand what the broader HPE is doing on the AI side and vice versa. So that was the reason for bringing them together.

>> And some of the highlights on the show, just run through them real quick.

>> Yeah, so we've had a number of announcements that we've made leading up to this event. Four key ones. The first one is private 5G. So we bought a company last year called Athonet. They do private 5G. And we're launching private 5G in a way that makes it easy for customers to buy the same as Wi-Fi. So that's private 5G. We also made some announcements around Wi-Fi 7, where we've got quite a differentiated product there with some unique features, gives customers more bandwidth for their users. We talked about that. We talked about large language models within Aruba Central to help customers if they've got problems. We've actually loaded 3 million questions that we believe customers would ask the platform. So that's all in there. And then the last announcement was all around the kind of AI capabilities we have within Aruba Central to spot issues, but in particular security threats. So with Ai, customers are dragging lots of data across the network, pulling it from endpoints like IOT devices. Some of them are old, connected to the internet, so sometimes they're a threat and the platform monitors and looks for strange behavior. So they're the four main announcements.

>> Those are certainly great announcements. And I think one of the things that caught my eye, and a lot of that we've heard reiterated here is that HPE and Aruba are sort of the adults in the room when it comes to AI. And there's been a lot of talk about responsible AI. So I wonder maybe if you want to talk a little bit about that and even from a security perspective, how you're bringing gen AI to Central, but you're doing it in a manner that allows organizations to remain highly secure as well.

>> Yeah, I think in Aruba we've had a team of dozens of data scientists focused on AI now for several years. And we've been leveraging the data, the telemetry that comes from all the devices we manage. And there's millions of them, 4 million plus. And obviously we anonymize that data to make sure we're complying with privacy regulations and so on. But we do think that rather than rushing things out with the opportunity of a risk of saying something incorrect or making the wrong recommendation, we've been really focused on how to take the tools that are out there, but put them on rails and then train them in our own environment with our own documentation, to make sure as customers use things like our AI search that yes, they're getting a nice short summarized answer, but it's referring them direct to our documentation so that they can see how we came up with that recommendation, and if they want double check.

>> Excellent. No, I think that's great. And I think one of the other areas I was really impressed with was the private 5G. So as we look at organizations, one of the challenges that I've always thought about with private 5G, having been in the telco industry in the past, radically different from Wi-Fi, whole different skillset, everything else. What you are doing is basically making it enterprise ready, making it easier to adopt. Eventually, from what I understand, combined into Central. So we've seen this happen for organizations that need operational efficiency. We've unified wireless SD WAN. And now you're extending that to private 5G. So that's pretty cool. I wonder if you could talk a little bit.

>> Yeah, I mean, look, private 5G is an interesting technology. It's very applicable for customers where they've got large outdoor areas. So think about ports, those sorts of areas, but also where speed is important. So we have customers who have warehouses, there's no people in the warehouses. There's robots whizzing up and down, taking packets off shelves, whatever it might be. And they believe that in that kind of high speed environment, private 5G is a better technology. So we're finding lots of use cases for private 5G. But as you say, it's a very different technology to Wi-Fi, but it shouldn't really be, it should just be another form of connectivity. So we thought, okay, how can we make this easy for customers to buy and consume and support as well? So yeah, we've spent, what, the last year productizing that, and just making it as easy for customers to buy as Wi-Fi.

>> Yeah, I think that's great. I think that's really going to help because so many people are stuck at the, I don't know, the technology, how do I get it deployed? And I like to call it, I refer to it as my principle of lease astonishment when I go into operate it. Hey, this looks an awful lot like the Aruba Central I've been using somewhere else. And it's just easier to adopt that and integrate it into that space. So that's all great. And speaking of wireless, you mentioned Wi-Fi 7, which is great. So the latest technology coming out, obviously there's some round outdoor capabilities as well that are thrown in there, but you also have some pretty cool technologies around IOT. And I wonder if you could maybe talk about that for a second as well.

>> Yeah. So obviously we've launched our Wi-Fi 7 AP range. And Wi-Fi 7 you'll be able to use six gigahertz. There's proprietary things we do, like our tri band filtering, so you can use all three bands at once, maximize the use of the spectrum. But beyond that, we think about the AP as a platform. You're going to deploy hundreds or thousands of them all over your ceiling. What else can they do? So one thing is we want them to be a hub for IOT. So those APs include radios for Bluetooth and SIG B. So we can aggregate all of those IOT devices, all of that data, and we can run applications on the AP from our partners so that they can aggregate and process that IOT data as it's collected and then fed perhaps into their cloud. So for us, AP as a sensor, AP as a platform, is as important as the Wi-Fi 6 to Wi-Fi 7 transition.

>> I love the connectivity analogy of being one connectivity layer, Wi-Fi 7 or 5G. We always joke on theCUBE, the massive hierarchy of the needs is Wi-Fi connectivity, food and shelter. People always, when network's down, people freak out.

>> We had a customer yesterday, University of Houston, the CIO, she said the network should be like air. And that was a good summary actually.

>> We agree. We've bandwidth junkies ourselves. But I wanted you to take a minute to explain the difference. I know there's some differences between 5G and Wi-Fi 7, when are they best? Where do they deploy? What's the difference? How do you architect that out? What's the deployment look like? And when does it fit? Can you just take us quickly through that?

>> Yeah, sure. I mean, look, as I said earlier, I think private 5G, we see some definite use cases. So in the defense market, for example, Army bases, Air Force bases, Navy bases, they're building up private 5G networks. And they've got a security interest. We talked about ports, warehouses, where you've got a large outdoor area that you want to cover. That's where you would pick private 5G. For Wi-Fi 7, we're thinking more about office buildings, campus environments, retail, large public venues, those sorts of things.

>> So range and throughput and density, they all factor in?

>> Yeah, yeah, exactly right. And the way I think about it just very simply is, private 5G access points equivalent would give you the same coverage as eight Wi-Fi access points. So that's the way to think about it. You get more outdoor coverage, if that makes sense from private 5G versus Wi-Fi.

>> Awesome. And also you guys are in the center point of all the value proposition here at HP Discover and your event Atmosphere. What are the customers telling you guys, and what's the conversation like on the product side? Are there new things that emerged between last year and this year with AI specifically that have jumped out to you? Maybe just on the roadmap or prioritized? How has the gen AI wave impacted you guys? You guys have been doing AI for a while, it's been around, it's just now generative AI, a little bit different. What's the impact to you guys from a product and then ultimately customer perspective?

>> Yeah, I think in terms of what people distinguishes we are talking about between AI for networking, networking for AI. So on the AI for networking side, I think the place where gen AI has had the biggest impact is in terms of the natural language interface. And as we demonstrated this morning, being able to hold context where you're asking questions, but you can be implicit referring to answers further up in the conversation, kind of conversational characteristic. That is a big new thing that is brought in with gen AI.

>> Yeah, I think that's certainly something that we're going to see more and more of. The days of doing the CLI commands are definitely dwindling, as more and more organizations develop these capabilities, it's going to enable organizations to run so much more efficiently having that. And then you guys have also been, you talk about the AI for networking. You've had AI ops for a while now too as well. So helping to drive operational efficiency when it comes to problem solving, reducing the number of trouble tickets, things like that have always been one of your strong points as well.

>> Yeah. I think the other thing I look at or think about with AI is, whenever there's a big change in the world, there's an impact on the network, isn't it? So you think about COVID, hybrid work, everyone wants to work from home, huge impact on the network, right?

>> Correct.

>> AI is going to be the same thing, isn't it? So whenever there's a big change, there's an impact on the network. And I think for AI, a lot of it's going to be around how do you draw data into the models, and you need the network to do that, don't you? If you don't have good data, you don't have a good model. So I think this is an exciting time to be in the networking business.

>> And you guys are moving a lot of data too, moving packets as data. So security becomes an issue. And the enterprises, they want gen AI. There's a huge demand for it. A lot of hype certainly. But it stalls out when you talk about governance, security, and then the fragmented data silos. How do you guys look at that from a networking? Does that impact you guys? Are you guys more lower level? What's your view on managing some of those privacy, security and then obviously the data estates as they are pretty broad?

>> So I think we address it on multiple levels. So one of the things is, obviously with Aruba Central, it's a cloud native architecture and it's designed to be delivered as a public SaaS service. It's obviously multi-tenant. But there are certain customers, certain segments, where they really want an environment that's on-prem and perhaps air-gapped. And so, one of the unique things about Aruba Central is not only is it a cloud native SaaS service, we can bring it on-prem, we can run it in a VPC, we can let an MSP use it to offer services. And so I think it's very flexible. We don't steer you in different directions depending on your answer to that, which of these categories are you in? It's all Aruba Central.

>> Yeah, then that makes a lot of sense. We've been following Aruba Central for a while, and the value it brings to organizations, like I said, that ability cloud native does not mean public cloud only. You can run it on-prem. And I think the other piece of that is to highlight a little bit is the fact that Central was chosen for GreenLake, so the extensibility of what you built out in Central is now being taken across the wider HPE portfolio as well. So I think that's super important as well to bring out.

>> I love the collective intelligence angle of democratizing the data for customers. That's also interesting. How do you guys see that on the deployment side? You said flexibility, so the clients, your customers are doing what scale deployments? Can you scope the kind of deployments you guys are doing right now with the product? What are some of the use cases? Probably small, medium, large, but are they mostly large interconnected? How big are some of your deployments?

>> So Aruba Central caters everything from small businesses through to retail chains that have tens of thousands of locations. And so I think that's actually another thing about Central, is we are using it for a broad range of use cases. And even one of the things we showed this morning is extending it into the data center. So it's well known as a tool for managing a campus and branch distributed enterprise, but we believe there's no reason you have to jump and use a different tool if you're building out an Aruba based data center. And so that's another interesting thing we showed today.

>> Yeah. So one of the things I also wanted to touch upon was security. In these highly distributed environment, it's hard to talk about connectivity without it being secure connectivity. You also, in addition to the acquisitions you've made with Athonet, you picked up a security company as well.

>> Yes, Access Security.

>> Access. Any announcements or anything you want to talk about how that integration has gone, the development has gone over the last year or so?

>> Yeah, so we've been continuing to invest in that technology. And one of the things we've been showing here at the show is a new capability we have using AI to recommend ZTNA policy. So the idea of zero trust is you start with connecting nothing to nothing, basically. It's a blank slate. Now you've got to just say, "This class of users can connect to these apps and this class of devices can connect to these services." For many customers, starting from kind of a blank sheet of paper and adding all these rules, it's hard. They've got a network that's operating, they don't exactly know what's in there. So what we've is used AI to be able to observe what's going on in their network and then make recommendations, "Hey, we think these are the 10 or 12 policies you should adopt." We don't actually put it into play until the customer says yes, but it really gives them a way to jumpstart their ZTNA deployments.

>> Got it. Yeah, and that certainly makes sense. It's never trust, always verify, I think is the rule of zero trust, so that makes a lot of sense to me.

>> Phil, I want to ask you about the vision around IOT, the impact of IOT. You starting to see, we're at Mobile World Congress last year, we saw the devices to the core as a big discussion. Apple had their big announcement, they talked about doing processing on the device itself. So the edge now is going out to the device. Now you've got also IOT devices. What's your conversations like? What's your vision around the impact of IOT and ultimately the device edge?

>> Well, I think as we talked earlier, I think this can become way more important in this AI world, because that's where a lot of the data is coming from. And I think when we talk to customers about, okay, what are you doing in AI? What are your plans? The first thing they have to start with is the data and how do you get the data back into your environment? So I think IOT is going to become more important to customers. And one of the announcements that I mentioned earlier is the fact that some of these IOT devices are old, so therefore security becomes more of a priority. And that's why we've added additional features into Aruba Central to be able to look for strange behavior in IOT devices, so I expect a resurgence of IOT in that discussion.

>> Yeah. And I love the AI copilot model, helping configure. Where does automation fit in? If you guys had to look at that, because that's a big part of where we see the first low hanging fruit use cases. Yeah, I got some recommendations, I got some agent technology coming down the pipe. With all the data you guys are throwing off, where are we going to see the action on automation agents, et cetera?

>> So automation is really critical. I mean, when you think about our security first architecture, one of the principles is having global policy. So most big enterprises have thousands of firewalls. Each firewall is configured with thousands of lines of ACLs. So in effect, that enterprise's security policy is millions of lines of rules. And just one of them has to be wrong, and you're letting someone in that you shouldn't or you're blocking someone that should be allowed. So it's no wonder we've got trouble managing that environment. It's really brittle. So what we believe, one of the principles of security first networking, is you want to describe the policy for your organization succinctly, maybe a hundred or 200 lines. And that describes everything for the enterprise, putting users into roles and devices into groups and describing what it is that they can do. Now, where the automation comes in is in actually pushing that and being able to enforce across the enterprise. And we believe in edge to cloud enforcement. If you can block something at the AP before it even gets on your network, that's good. If it's in the switch or the gateway, that's good. If it's a remote user and they never touching the premise, then you need cloud pops. And that's what we're doing with our SSC offer. So we want to use automation to implement that global policy across the spectrum there. And doing that automate it means you're eliminating your chance of human error.

>> Yeah. A couple of years ago, the big conversation was build it from the beginning, build the security from the beginning. You guys done that. You get the zero trust. Check. Check. Final question, Phil and David, for next year, as you look forward, what do we expect to see in the market? What should we be paying attention to as analysts? What should customers be thinking about as the momentum continues? Certainly the hype's going to turn into reality. We're going to see a lot more GreenLake as a service. What are you guys focused on? What should we be focused on? What should we expect?

>> Well, look, a year from now, what are going to be the big things, obviously I'd expect AI has become way more of a reality versus what are we going to do? So I think we're way more into an AI world. And obviously the big thing that's linked to that from an HP perspective is the acquisition of Juniper. And the reason we're doing that is to create a comprehensive network portfolio because we believe that customers want another choice in the market. And we believe by combining Aruba with Juniper from a network perspective, that's a really strong portfolio in an AI world. So they're the big things that we're expecting .

>> And in tech trends, what should we be paying attention to?

>> In what, sorry?

>> The tech trends on our side, which should we be tracking?

>> Yeah, I think in terms of technology, you're going to see the continued advancement of the AI for networking. That's basically something we're focused on. Also, the interplay, as we talked about between Wi-Fi and private 5G, so things like more seamless roaming. We also anticipate that there'll be further advancement with security, with security first, with the ability to automatically react to things that we're seeing versus just flagging them.

>> Right. Great stuff. We're looking forward to having you on next year. Great to see you. Congratulations on Atmosphere being part of Discover. And next year will be a wild ride. Again, networking is where the action is. Multi-generational bet continues to be relevant. Thanks for coming on theCUBE.

>> No, thank you.

>> David-

>> Glad to be here too.

>> The brains behind Aruba here in theCUBE, bringing you the data. All the packets are flowing on theCUBE. Right now we're streaming at to you live. I'm John Furrier with Bob Laliberte here with Cube Research. We'll be right back after this short break.

Future of Networking: secure, intelligent networks that are optimized for performance and management

>> Yeah, likewise. Good to see you.

>> And some of the highlights on the show, just run through them real quick.

>> We had a customer yesterday, University of Houston, the CIO, she said the network should be like air. And that was a good summary actually.

>> So range and throughput and density, they all factor in?

>> Correct.

>> Yes, Access Security.

>> Access. Any announcements or anything you want to talk about how that integration has gone, the development has gone over the last year or so?

>> Got it. Yeah, and that certainly makes sense. It's never trust, always verify, I think is the rule of zero trust, so that makes a lot of sense to me.

>> And in tech trends, what should we be paying attention to?

>> In what, sorry?

>> The tech trends on our side, which should we be tracking?

>> No, thank you.

>> David-

>> Glad to be here too.