>>The cube presents HPE discover 2022 brought to you by HPE. >>Welcome back to the Venetian convention center. You're watching the Cube's coverage of HPE discover 2022. The first discover live discover in three years, 2019 was the last one. The cube we were just talking about. This has been at H HP discover. Now HPE since 2011, my co-host John furrier. We're pleased to welcome Phil Maru. Who's the executive vice president and general manager of HPE Aruba. And he's joined by David Hughes, the chief product and technology officer at HPE Aruba gentleman. Welcome to the cube. Good to see you. Thank you. Thank >>You. >>Okay, so you guys talk a lot, Phil, about the intelligent edge. Yep. Okay. What do you, what do you mean by that? >>Yeah, so we, well, we're kind of focused on, is providing technology to customers that sits out at the edge and typically the edge would be, uh, any location out of the data center or out of the cloud. So for the most part, our customers would deploy our technology either in their office premises or maybe retail premises shops, uh, maybe deploying out of the home where their employees are on a factory floor. And we're really talking about technology to connect both people and devices back to, um, systems and technology throughout an organization. So, but >>I, I, you know, sometimes I call it the near edge and the far edge yeah. Near, near edge. Maybe as we saw home Depot up on the stage yesterday far, Edge's like space. Right. You're including all of that. Right. That's >>Edge. >>Yeah. And actually we, we, we, you know, we've got a broad range of technology that actually works within the data center as well. So, you know, what we are focused on is providing, uh, network technology, software and services. And, you know, for the most part, our heritage is at the edge, but it's more pervasive than that. So >>If you have the edge, you got connectivity and power, that's an edge. How much, um, is the physical world being connected now you're seeing robotics automation. Yeah. Ex and with machine learning specifically in compute, really driving a new acceleration at the edge. What you, how do you guys view that? What's your reaction? Yeah. >>I think, look, it, I think as connectivity is improving and that's both in terms of wifi connectivity, so, you know, wifi technology continues to, uh, advance and also you've got this new kind of private 5g area, just generally connectivity is becoming more pervasive and that's helping some industries that haven't previously embraced it. And I think industrial is, is one of the big ones. So, you know, historically it was difficult for kind of car manufacturers to really enable a factory floor. But now the connectivity is connectivity is better. That gives them the opportunity to be able to really change how they do things. So >>David, if you do take an outside in view, mm-hmm <affirmative>, uh, and, and, and when you talk to customers, what are they telling you and how is that informing your product strategy? >>Yeah, well, you >>Know, I think there's, there's several themes we hear. One is, you know, it's really important, better work from anywhere they wanna enable their employees, um, to get the same experience, whether they're at home or on the road or in their branch office or at headquarters. Um, you know, people are also concerned that as they deploy, deploy all of this IOT and pursuit of digital transformation, they don't want those devices to be a weak point where someone breaks into one device and moves naturally, um, across the network. So they want to have this great experience for their customers and their users, but they wanna make sure that they're not compromising security, um, in any way. And so it's about getting that balance between ease of use and, and security. That's one of the primary things we hear, >>You know, Dave, one of the things we talked about many, many years ago was when hybrid and was starting to come out multi-cloud was on the, on the table early on. Uh, we were, we were saying, Hey, the data center is just a big edge, right? I mean, if you have cloud operations and you see what's going on with GreenLake here now, the momentum hybrid cloud is cloud operations, right? An edge off data centers to a big edge on premises. And you got the edge as you have cloud operations, like say GreenLake, plugging in partners and diverse environments. You're connecting, not just branch offices that are per perimeter based. You have no perimeter and you have now other companies connecting mm-hmm <affirmative> so you got data and you got network. How do you guys see that transition as GreenLake has a very big ecosystem part of it, partners and whatnot. >>Yeah. So, you know, I think for us, um, the ecosystem of partners that we have is critical in terms of delivering what our customers need. And, you know, I think one of the really important areas is around verticals. So, um, you know, when you think about different verticals, they have similar problems, but you need to tailor the solutions. Um, to each of those, you know, we are talking a bit about devices and people. When you look at say a healthcare environment, there can be 30 devices there for each patient. And, um, so there's connecting all those devices securely, but we have partners that will help pull all of that together that may be focused on, um, you know, medical environment that may focused on stadiums. They may be focused on industrial. Um, so having partners that understand those verticals and working closely with them to deliver solutions is important in our go to market. >>So another kind of product question and related to what you just said, David, I got connectivity, speed, reliability, cost security, or maybe a missing something. But you, you said earlier, you gonna gotta balance those. How do you do that? And do you do that for the specific use cases? Like for instance, you just mentioned stadiums and 81 and how do you balance those and, and do you tailor those for the use cases? >>Yeah, well, I think it depends on the customer and different people have different views about where they need to be. So some people are, are so afraid about security. They wanna be air gapped and completely separate than the internet. That would be one extreme mm-hmm <affirmative> other people, you know, look at it and see what's happening with COVID with everyone working from home with people being able to work from Starbucks or the airport. And they're beginning to think, well, why is the branch that much different? And so what I think we are seeing is, you know, a reevaluation of how people connect to, um, the apps they're using and, uh, you know, you, you, you've probably for sure heard people talking about zero trust, talking about micro segmentation. You know, I think what we we see is that people wanna be able to build a network in a way where rather than any device being able to talk to any device or any person, which is where the internet started, we wanna build to build networks where people or devices can only talk to the destinations that are necessary for them to do their job. >>And so a lot of the technology that we are building into the network is really about making security intrinsic by limiting what can talk to what that's >>Actually micro, micro segmentations, zero trust, um, these all point to a modern, the modern network, as you say, Antonio Neri was just on the cube, talking about programmability, substrate, the words like that come to mind, what is the modern network look like? I mean, you have to be agile. You have to be programmable. You have to have security. Can you describe in your words, what does the modern network these days need to look like? How should customers think about architecting them? What are some of the table stakes and what are some of the differentiators that customers need to do to have a modern network? >>Yeah, well, you covered off a coup a few quarter, one there with clarity and so on. So let me pick one that you didn't mention. And, and I, you know, I think we are seeing, you know, a lot of interest around network as a service. And, you know, when we think about network as a service, we think about it broadly, um, you know, for consumers, we're getting more and more used to buying things as a service versus buying a thing. When you, when you get Alexa, you care about how well she answers your questions, you don't care about what CPU is or how much Ram Alexa has. And likewise with networking, people are caring about the outcomes of keeping their employees connected, keeping their, their devices and systems running. And so what for us, what NASA is all about is that shift of thinking about a network as being a collection of devices that get managed to being a framework for connectivity and running it from the point of view of those outcomes. >>And so whether, you know, it's about CapEx versus OPEX or about do it yourself, managing the network yourself versus outsourcing that, um, or it's about the, you know, Greenfield versus brownfield, each of our customers has got a different starting point, but they're all getting heading towards this destination of being able to treat their network as a service. And so that is, you know, a key area of innovation for us and whether it's big customers like home Depot that you heard about yesterday, um, where we kind of manage everything for them on a, as on a store basis, um, for connectivity, um, or, you know, the recent, um, skew based nest that we launched, which is a really scalable foundation for our partners to build nest offerings around. Um, we see this as a key part of network modernization. Yeah. >>And one of the things, again, that's great stuff. Uh, infrastructure is code, which was really kind of pioneer the DevOps movement in cloud kind of as platform level. And you got data ops now and AI at the top of the stack, we were always wondering when network as code was gonna come, uh, and where you actually have it, where it's programmable. I mean, we all know what policies do do. They're good. That's all great network as code. >>Yeah. >>And that's the concept that's like DevOps, it's like, make it work just seamlessly, just be always on. And >>Yeah. And smart, you know, people are always looking for the, for the easy button. Um, and so they want, they want things to operate easily. They want it to be easy to manage. And, you know, I actually think there's a little bit of a, um, a conflict between networkers code and the easy button, right? So it depends on the class of customers. Some customers like financials, for instance, have a huge software development organizations that are extremely capable that could, that can go with program ability that want things as code. But the majority of the, of, of the verticals that we deal with, um, don't have those big captive software organizations. And so they're really looking for automation and simplicity and they wanna outsource that problem. So in Aruba central, we have invested a lot to make it really easy for our customers to, um, get what they need, you know, is that movement of zero code. It's more like zero code. They want, they want something packaged now >>The headless networks. Yeah. Low code, no code >>Kind of thing. Yeah, that's right. And, you know, obviously for people that have the sophistication that want to, um, do the most advanced things, we have APIs. And so we support that kind of programmable way of doing things. But I'd say that that's that's, those are more specialized customers. So >>Phil, yeah. Uh, is that the strategy? I mean, David listed off a number of, of factors here is that Aruba's strategy to modernize networks to actually create the easy button through network as a service is as simple as dial tone. Is that how we >>Should think? I mean, the way I think about the strategy is I think about it as a triangle, really, along the bottom, we've got the products and services that we offer and we continue to add more products and services. We either buy companies such as silver peak a couple of years ago, or we build, uh, additional products and by, and by the way, that's in response to customers who are frustrated with some other suppliers and wanna move on mass over to, uh, companies like ourselves. So at the bottom layer of the product and services, and then the other side of the triangle one would be NAS, which we talked about, which is kind of move to buying network and as a service. And then the other side of the triangle is the platform, which for us is river central, which is part of HP GreenLake. And that's really all about, you know, kind of making it easy for customers to manage networks and Aruba central right now has got about 120,000 live customers on it. It connects to about 2 million devices and it's collecting a lot of data as well. So we anonymously collect data from all of our customers. We've got one and a half billion data points in the platform. And what we do is we let that data kind of look for anomalies and spot problems on the network before they happen for customers. >>So Aruba central predated, uh, uh, GreenLake GreenLake. Yeah. And, and so did you write to GreenLake through GreenLake APIs? How, what was the engineering work to accomplish that? >>Yeah, so really, um, Aruba central is kind of the Genesis of the GreenLake platform. So we took Aruba central and made it more generic okay. To build the GreenLake cloud platform. And you know, what we've done very recently is bring, bring Aruba into that unified infrastructure, along with storage and compute. So the same sign-on applies across all of HP's, um, products, the same way of managing licenses, managing devices. And so it provides us, uh, great foundation going forwards to, um, solve more comprehensively. Our customers automation requires. >>So, so just a quick follow. So Aruba actually was the main spring of GreenLake from the standpoint of okay. Sing, like you said, single sign on a platform that could evolve and become more, more generic. Yes. So, okay. So that was a nice little, um, bonus of the acquisition, you know, it's now the whole company >><laugh> Aruba taking over. >>Yeah. There's been a lot of work to, to, uh, you know, make it generic and, and widely applicable. Right. Yeah. Um, so, but >>You were purpose >>Built for yeah. Well it's foundational. Yes. So foundational for GreenLake, they built on top of it. Yeah. So you mentioned the data points, billions of data points. So I gotta ask you, cuz we're seeing this, um, copy more and more with machine learning, driving a lot of acceleration, cuz you can do simulations with machine learning and compute. We had Neil McDonal done earlier. He's a compute guy, you got networking. So with all this, um, these services and devices being put on and off the network humans, can't actually figure this out. You can discover what's on the network. How are you guys viewing the discovery and monitoring because there's no perimeter okay. On the network anymore. So I want to know what's out there. Um, how do you get through it? How does machine learning and AI play into this? >>Yeah. I mean, what we are trying to do is obviously flag trends for customers and say, Hey look, you know, we can either see something happening with your network. So there's a particular issue over here and we need to, I dunno, free up more capacity to solve that. Or we're looking at how their network is running and then comparing that with anonymized data from all of our other customers as well. So we're just helping find those problems. But yeah, you're right. I mean, I think it is becoming more of an issue for organizations, you know, how do you manage the network, >>But you see machine learning and AI playing a big part. >>Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I think, uh, AI massively and, and other technology advances as well that we make. So recently we, uh, also announced the availability of location awareness within our access points. And that might sound like a simple thing. But when network, when companies build out their networks, they often lose or they potentially could lose the records as to, well, where were the access points that we laid out and actually where are they not within, you know, 20 feet, but where actually are they? So we introduced kind of location, finding technology as well into our, uh, access points to make it easy for >>Customers. So Aruba one of the best, if not the best acquisition. I think that HP E has made, um, it's made by three par was, you know, good. It saved the storage business. Okay. That was more of a defensive play. Uh, but to see Aruba, it's a growth business. You guys report on it every quarter. Yeah. It's obviously a key ingredient to enable uh, uh, GreenLake and, and a that's another example, nimble was similar. We're much smaller sort of more narrow, but taking the AI ops piece and bringing it over. So it's, it was great to see HPE executing on some of its M and a as opposed to just leaving them alone and not really leveraging 'em. So guys, yeah. Congratulations really appreciate you guys coming on and explaining that. Congratulations on all the, all the great work and thanks for coming on the cube. Okay. >>Thank you guys. Yeah. Thanks for having us. >>All right, John, and I'll be back right after this short break. You're watching the cube, the leader in enterprise tech coverage from HPE Las Vegas, 2022. We'll be right back.

>>I'm john free with the Q we are here. It's exciting news around the next evolution switching, Sony jean Donny, co founder and chief business officer Pensando and David Hughes chief product and technology officer Aruba HP. Welcome back. We just heard from Antonio neary and john Chambers about the HPV Ruba partnership with Pensando and the new switching platform. Tell me more about the exciting news you're announcing? >>Yeah, I'm really excited today to be introducing the CX 10,000 distributed services switch. It's a brand new class of switch way bringing together the best of Aruba switching technology adding to R C X portfolio combining with Pence Sandoz technology that technology embedded in the platform. The problem we're solving is that in a traditional data center, all of those services like fire walling and low balancing provided by centralized appliances. And while that might be okay for north south traffic traffic that's going in and out of the data center. It's not scalable and it's not cost effective to apply to every service in every port to every flow traversing their data center As we all know with microservices more and more of the traffickers east west over 70% today and growing and so what we're doing here with the C X 10,000 is giving enterprises away to take the smart nick technology that's been proven out by hyper scholars and introduce it into their data centers in a very cost effective and easy to deploy way we're embedding that capability in the top of rack switch so that we can apply Fireable services, low balancing services to every port To every flow, delivering 100 times a scale in terms of a CLS 10 times of performance, in terms of encryption at a third of the cost of those traditional network architectures. So it's a super exciting time, >>love the speed, love the energy there. But I gotta ask what makes this a new category of switch. >>Well if you take a look at the journey we have been on as we have evolved our data centers and the applications have evolved for our customers. Uh and the world is now a bold new world of multi cloud. Uh the architecture is in the data center which are leaves spine architectures have become the new norm. Software defined, networking is pervasively deployed by our customers but as this journey began five or seven or even about 10 years ago uh and has culminated into a much more mature set of building blocks. We have taken the problem from one space of automating networks in the data center to then introducing lots and lots of expensive appliances to bring about security for example, or the state full services, whether it's load balancing or whether it's encryption and visibility and telemetry types of services. Now the customers had to try, you know, trombone all the traffic in and out of these appliances driving up the cost uh and the complexity and when time comes to troubleshoot these environments, it's extremely complex because you're trying to rationalize fabrics coming from one place appliances coming from four or five different vendors, maintaining all the software elements that need to be kept track off. Uh and as more and more customers want to aspire towards zero trust security model. Uh we need to start to embrace a lot of the principles that have been implemented by the hyper scholars and the cloud vendors, which is doing away with the appliances doing away with agent technology on servers, but instead to bring that technology for east west uh into play as well as to ensure that if there are bad actors that are landing inside of the data centers that they do not have the ability to, you know, create attack surfaces with complete lateral movement. Today, that is possible. Uh if you look at 70% of all the attacks that have been happening here in the past few years, it's as a result of having a attack surface which is pretty large in the data centers. And that gets further complicated when you move towards a multi cloud environment where the perimeter of the data center is now moving into the edge. Whether that edges, whether fleet resides for our customers or whether that edge happens to be a co location edge where you're building your own rampant off ramps. So I think the compelling event essentially is driven by the whole notion of distribution of services and having them available from a security and from a services point of view and these are state full services as close to the workload as you possibly can get them. >>So you guys really hit on some key points, their cloud, native microservices East west, north south, um no perimeter edge. These are topics that we would talk about kind of individually over the years, it's happening now all at the same time, this is causing a lot of complexities and then the security challenges you just laid out are everywhere. This brings up a big conversation around solving this. How does this new architecture, this solution solve the complexity and the security challenges in the data center. >>If you look at the use cases that our customers are talking about. The first, the initial use case really is to bring about security and state full security for east west traffic right into the fabric of their data centers. So having the ability to deliver that while eliminating the complex appliances only to do the job which they do very well, which is not South protection of services. Uh that also allows us the ability then to start to deliver visibility and telemetry at the same time that we're delivering state full security firewall and micro segmentation services because what I cannot see, I cannot secure. Uh so those two elements are initial use cases out of the box for our customers as we deliver this platform to them and then as more and more use cases that are becoming evident to us through customer interactions come into play. For example, the co location edge that I would like. David to walk you through a bit more in terms of how we help solve for that use case. >>So for the cooler use case, I think we're moving from a world where people talk about data centers to now talking about centers of data and those centers of data. Yes, they can be in a core private data center, they could be in the cloud but more and more they're going to be distributed around the edge in co location environments. And what we need to be able to do is extend those services that were provided in the data center to be provided in those Kahlo's at the edge And again we want to do that without having to deploy a whole rack of appliances that may be cost more than a computer itself and so with the CX- 10,000 we can have that as a top of rack switch for that polo. And from that switch deploy all of the encryption and firewall ng services that that polo requires. And what's important is that we're doing it with the same policy framework under the same management system across the whole enterprise in the data center as well as in these co location environments and out into the cloud. >>So you guys mentioned visibility and a quick follow up on this question because you mentioned visibility can't see it, you can't protect it. But also there's a lot of workloads that people are trying to automate. These are two factors. Can you guys just double down on that? I want to just get that out there because I think this becomes a big thing. >>I think policy having the ability to have an intent based policy that is a foundational technology building block that we are brought together is a very important element. And then when you map it back to tools that Aruba is extending support for including this platform, become very valuable. So David, why don't you walk us >>through? You know, I think one of the advantages that we bring is that this is an extension of the Aruba C X switching portfolio. So yeah, it's a cloud native microservices, very modern switch architecture and we have a comprehensive management platform, the Aruba fabric controller. And so what we are doing is making sure that everything fits together nicely, that we're delivering a complete solution to our customers. But one important thing to mention here is that we are thinking about how customers can do this step by step. So no, we're not requiring them to rebuild their entire data center, They can do this one rack at a time. We can work with their existing spine and deploy one leaf at a time in a very measured way. And so we think it's a great way for enterprises to be able to consume this modern distributed platform. >>That's a great segment. The next question. I mean I totally see this as you guys are talking about the cloud native trend, driving a cloud operational model to every edge. The data center is just another edge. It's a center of data. Love that. I love that line. So I have to kind of ask the operational side of the question, how would an enterprise customers manage all this take us through the nuts and bolts of deploying and managing of his gum? A customer >>That's a very good question. If you take a look at the customer's deployment models and let's let's take the example of they want to now bring in this technology and build a part or highly secure part with it for east west and to make sure that they're protecting 100% of that east west traffic. I think that leveraging all the building blocks that we have innovated between us and Aruba. We want to make sure that the ecosystem that the customer has built, they want whether they have built it with companies like Splunk and service now or Guardianco, they want integration points will be made available to them. If you take a look at, take a step back and say for these environments as you aspire to go toward zero trade security. The issues of inserting security appliances into network flows and having the ability to map it to the knowledge of applications and their dependencies for policy becomes an important function to tackle. So once you accept that, Okay, I have state full security functions built into this top of rack device available for my applications and all workloads, whether they're container workloads, bare metal workload, virtualized workloads uh and I have complete visibility into those workloads without compromising on connectivity and I can control through enforcement of policy where I need it because now security is part of the fabric, it's not a bolt on. Then comes the job of integration with an ecosystem. So whether you're looking at seem and sold companies where we are delivering in close collaboration with Splunk, A Pensando app for Splunk there's also going to be the availability of an elastic module, A plug in module. Uh then turn attention to what's more automation and devops and civil playbooks for the C X 10-K will be made available day one so that where you do not have the ability to deploy the A. F. C. You can use your existing answerable toolkit and they're making those playbooks available to our customers. Uh They want integration with application discovery mapping companies like Guardianco, allowing them to discover who's talking to whom and push and enforce that policy through the C X 10-K will allow for more automated deployments of those policies and finally, compliance integration with vendors like too thin for continuous security compliance monitoring becomes extremely important as the screen depicts a lot of lot of visualization capabilities with companies like Elk which are in beta today and answerable and Splunk and Elk will all be targeted at first customer shipment. So again, telemetry visibility with the integration of the ecosystem. Uh, it becomes a very powerful combination for the customers as they look to operationalize this for day to day three and they, you know, day one, day two, day three automation. >>That's awesome. David, I'd like to let you weigh in on this whole question of operations because you're hitting all the marks here that are relevant cloud, native microservices, apps, explosion and data volume and velocity, hyper scale operational cloud operations, performance, price point security all in this one solution. This is big. Um, it's not like you mentioned earlier, it's not a rip and replace but you can roll it out how how do you see a customer best operational izing this new, >>You know, I think the answer is a little bit different for each customer but you are very careful at the beginning, we introduced this. It's an evolution of switching. It's not a revolution where we have to replace everything and I think that's really exciting is that it builds on the foundational architecture of leaf and spine. And what we're able to do is let that customer introduced these new capabilities one leaf at a time. So maybe when they're upgrading from 10 gigs to 25 gigs, it's a great time for them to introduce this capability into their data center um and then depending on their application, you know, it may be, as Sony said that they've got one particular application, a crown jewel application and so they want to build out that in one rack and provide, you know, very, very robust East west as well as north south um security around that application, but there's so many different ways that customers can deploy this technology and what's really exciting is now is we're beginning to work with our customers, learning about these new use cases and then feeding that back into our roadmap and we all >>know, as you get down lower in the network layer, security is distributed architecture. So everything is paramount like security, super relevant, great conversation, I gotta ask what's next with this technology. Yeah, >>well, you know the teams, the two engineering teams are working together and this is step one on, on a really exciting new path, I don't know, Sony, what would you say? >>I think there's a lot more to come here. This is just a starting point. We have an incredibly strong partnership and go to market partnership here with Uber team with this platform. It is just the beginning uh and it will lead our customers onto the multi cloud journey. Uh and last but not least, I would like to say that you know, in closing uh that are seldom opportunities where you look at disrupting the way things are happening while fitting into customers existing models. So this is, as I said with everything being software defined, you will continue to see as delivering at great velocity more and more software defined services, whether it's encryption, Lord balancing and other state full services over time. Making this technology easier to deploy by fitting into the existing ecosystem and continuing to provide them with the 100 extra scale, 10 X. The performance as well as the ability to do it at a third of the same, you know, at the third of the cost of what they would need to if they had to build this uh today with disparate devices, >>exciting news in the industry. You guys are the pros you've seen all the waves of innovation over the years. I guess my final final question would be, how would you summarize this point in time right now? This is pretty um exciting all this is all happening At the same time, customers are having opportunity to innovate the pandemic has shown a lot of scale and and the need for stability and security. This is a special moment. How would you guys weigh in on that? >>Yeah, I think about it every decade, there's a change in how data centers a belt. And so this is the change that's happening this decade. Moving to a distributed services, switch. The other big mega trend that I see is this move, as I said from data centers to stand as a data and the opportunity for customers to use this technology as they move out to the edge. Have distributed compute and tell us, what do you think Sony? >>I think I couldn't agree more. I think there are so many various technology transitions occurring now. The cloud being the biggest one. Uh the explosion of data and uh, you know, the customers making decisions of having a distributed model And if indeed two thirds, if not 75% of all data will be processed at the edge over the next few years. This architecture is prime for the enterprise to go leverage their best practices of today while they can gradually move that architecture is for the future, which is a multi cloud future >>centers of data, large scale cloud operations automation. The speed of innovation has never seen this before. Uh It's exciting time. Sunny, thank you for coming on. And David, thanks for chatting about this exciting new announcement. Thank you very much. >>Thank you. Thank you. >>This is the power of and hp. Ruba and Pensando partnership. I'm john forward the cube. Thanks for watching. Mhm