>>Thank you. >>Hi and welcome to the Aruba Pensando announcement. I'm lisa martin. Hopefully you've seen the announcement from Antonio and john but if you haven't, we're going to dig into it from an analyst perspective joining me is bob La Liberty, senior analyst at Enterprise strategy Group to unpack the announcement, bob Welcome to the program. >>Thank you very much. Great to be here. >>So in this case anybody hasn't seen the announcement go ahead and give me an overview, what are these two companies announcing? >>Yeah, absolutely. So essentially what you've seen is is that Pensando, who's been developing this distributed services platform to be deployed as an intelligent card, basically has taken their technology and incorporate it into an Aruba switch. So now you can get distributed services, all the great capabilities that Pensando has been working on combined with an Aruba top of rack switch, all managed under the Aruba fabric controller. Um so you've got a really simplistic way to be able to provision, configure and update and assigned policies to all those great Pensando state full services in the top of rack switch for an existing data center environment >>and what's your overall synopsis? Is this a disruptive technology? What do you think? >>Yeah, I really like this. I mean the whole goal of developing this technology was to be somewhat disruptive. It was to enable data center organizations to basically recreate what hyper scale hours are doing and the whole concept is around how do I improve, how do I distribute the services that are needed to help my application to protect my applications closer to the applications themselves. Um so I really find that this is something that's that's really needed. You know, we've seen the pendulum swinging towards distributed. But the interesting part about this announcement is that the majority of applications still reside in existing data centers. And the other the other kind of interesting pieces that, you know, cloud native, everyone talks about cloud native applications, but cloud native doesn't always mean public cloud only and that organizations are actually gonna run them in a hybrid. So organizations need to figure out how they're going to run these cloud native applications and their existing data center environments. And what the combination of the technologies enable organizations to do is to basically retrofit if you will that top of rack switch and be able to deploy, excuse me, deploy those distributed services at a top of rack switch. Instead of having to either rely on existing hardware appliances that are pulled off to the side of the network or to have to deploy agents onto the server which could impact the application performance. So they've kind of hit that goldilocks spot of being able to provide distributed services without impacting the application performance. In fact, when you look at it from that perspective of its not having to go to that appliance pool any longer, it's actually going to increase the performance, right? Your latency is going to be a lot lower because instead of hair pinning through the core of your network. Now you're just going to your top of rack switch. So it's going to improve the performance. >>Everybody wants improved performance. Especially in this the fact that things are continuing to stay distributed and we probably will have some part of that be permanent. So bob how do customers upgrade or integrate this into their existing environments? Talk to me a little bit more about that and the simplicity, it sounds like what you're saying with which they can do that. >>Yeah, this should be a fairly minimally minimally disruptive uh type of integration, essentially what you're doing if you've got a high availability top of rack it environment, you're going to be swapping out one top of rack switch at the time. And organizations do this quite often when they're upgrading for capacity and things of that nature. So in this case it's simply going to be replacing the top of rack switch and organizations can look at different ways of how they want to do this. You know, to start they might want to look at where they're critical applications are and deploy them. They're so they've got the services, it might be based on looking at where, I don't know you might have some regulated services. Right. Pc I things like that that need to make sure that they've got higher levels of security. So essentially it's all about just simply deploying those top of rack switches going on to Aruba's fabric controller being able to spend that up configure, apply the policies and the security policies that you want to employ for those applications and and let it run, >>Talk to me about this in certain context that we know some of the industry's every industry obviously has been affected by the events of the last 1819 months. What we think of manufacturing, healthcare, financial services, give me uh your perspective into some of the customers in those industries and how they'll be able to take advantage of this technology as their environments continue to distribute. >>Yeah, I mean, I think that the interesting piece of this is that, you know what it's really about for any industry, it's about as they modernize their data center, as they modernize their applications. Right? So we've seen the transition from um monolithic too. So a based apps to microservices based applications and and that's really what's driving this. Because what's happening in all those organizations now, there's a lot of of communication within those applications themselves. Right? Because instead of having one monolithic application or two or three pieces of an application, you could now have dozens or hundreds of pieces of an application that need to talk to each other. And so the key for all of these industries, right. Regardless of the industry, when you're deploying this is how do you secure that communication, how do you make sure that East West traffic is being fully protected um because as organizations, you know, the legacy approach was castle and moat protect the perimeter, which was great. But if you got inside that perimeter right then the malware could really put periphery slow, deliberate, sorry, can't talk today. Um, but the idea is now, how can I deploy services that are able to protect that east west traffic as well? And so by deploying those services at the top of rack, you can do that more easily without having any kind of an impact. Right? So I think that you know the zero trust is what it's the mantra is never trust, always verify. And so that's what organizations are looking to do. So even if there is a malware attack and they do get inside the data center that it's not able to spread throughout that organization. >>Got it. And that's absolutely critical. We have seen the security landscape change dramatically in the last year and a half, we've seen this massive spike in ransom where it's companies in every industry. I now know that it is not a matter of if we get attacked, it's when we've seen a massive increase in detail. So let's kind of dig into, You mentioned some of the benefits in terms of low latency performance, let's unpack the security level there. What are some of the things that you've seen in the security landscape where zero trust is absolutely critical for every industry? >>Yeah. Well, like I said, it's really all about how do you make sure you're protecting there's a lot more communication going on within your application itself and how do you protect it? And so as that landscape has changed, it's critically important for organizations to adapt to that and to be able to, you know, make this change happen. So I mean we've seen this in the hyper scale is right. They've deployed the technology, they have it running at the right and those, those intelligent cards at the server level as close as they can. But for an existing data center, it doesn't make sense, right, unless you're replacing your whole data center, which is obviously incredibly disruptive. It's this is really about how do you insert those services in a minimally minimally disruptive way. And that's what that's what's really key here. The other interesting pieces because of the location, because they can track that east west traffic and apply the security policies to it and they can see all that and they've got visibility into it. They can then take that information and they can export it to existing other security tools. So you're not going to get rid of your perimeter security, you still need that. So this is more about a defense and depth about securing or augmenting your security posture and creating much more, much more, much tighter security around those modern application environments as well. So, so having this capability, like I said, it really starts to democratize that, that capability and the functions that the hyper scholars have and it brings it into existing enterprise data center environments and I think that's really what's important. And then, like I said, as organizations progress, they can take the data that they're collecting and they can leverage that with XDR solutions, right? Feed it into other, you know, sense or things like that. That can really help organizations um, you know, enhance their machine learning algorithms and things like that. The more data you can collect, the better you can, you can nail down the the policies that need to be provided there. >>Well, that's important too. As every company these days either needs to become a data company or if they don't, they're probably not going to be around much longer. Talk to me about the overall security kind of like implication. You said this is going to help organizations in any industry augment their overall security posture. That's so critically important these days. >>Yeah. And it's like I said, it's really about having that that full visibility into the east west flows for these so, and their ability, the distributed services switch is able to stream all of that telemetry of those flows right? And that can be complemented by the existing north south firewall telemetry as well. So you've got all this data for the XDR engines and things like that so that you can really determine whether there's an insider attack where there's any movement of malware, things like that, whether there's an external actor that's gotten into the data center, so it really provides you with a lot more visibility and that visibility provides that data that you talked about. So that's really what's key here and again, it's the ability here is that you're not needing to deploy XDR agents on every workload so there's no impact to the application performance when you're doing it in this this matter. So that's what makes it a really kind of an elegant solution to being able to modernize and deliver these capabilities into an existing data center environment. >>What do you think the timeframe is for an organization to be able to take advantage of this technology? >>Yeah, that's a good question. I mean really it's it's up to the, you know, it's up to the organization themselves. Clearly, once the technology is released by Aruba they've got the ability to start deploying it um you know, obviously one of the easiest ways to deploy it might be if they were adding a new rack, adding some new capabilities then certainly that's completely non disruptive and they can get going there, but like I said it, excuse me, it's also quite easy for organisations to be able to to just simply if they've got a high availability top of rack environment to start augmenting it into their existing their existing infrastructure as well, fairly non destructively >>excellent. That non disruption augmentation is critical. I I do want to ask you a question in terms of the partnership with HP Aruban Pensando, what does this signify on the HP side in your opinion? >>Mhm Well from from the HP side, like I said, I think this is a HP has been involved with Pensando for a long time now. They've obviously recognized the value of the technology and wanted to partner with them from an early stage and so um what it really helps is you're thinking about moving forward. It creates a unique opportunity for organizations to take advantage of the Pensando technology within the HP server environments as well as those top of rack switches and create some really unique opportunities to drive even greater visibility and protection. >>Let's do one more thing bob. Let's just summarize your key takeaways if somebody has 30-60 seconds to watch this and see what the three things are that Bob says we need to be taking away from this announcement. What are those three things? >>Yeah, I think the key thing is first to recognize that modern application environments are gaining ground and that organizations need to accommodate these new application architecture. Right? But to do that, they need a solution. They need some technology to help them. So the key takeaway is that this now this H P E. Aruba and Pensando distributed services switch enables you to deploy distributed services into your existing environment in a minimally disruptive way and it provides you with the benefits of improving security of improving performance and user experiences. Um all while making sure that you can scale and do it simply through a single interface through the Aruba fabric controller. >>Got it. And being able to deliver those outstanding customer and user experiences is critical as we are in this day and age where our business lives blend with our consumer lives that we expect things to be able to work like that bob. Thank you for joining me on the program, breaking down the HP Aruba Pensando announcement, telling us what it is, what the benefits are in it for customers and how they can take advantage of that. We appreciate your analysis. >>Very welcome. It's great to be here. >>Probably Liberty. I'm lisa martin. You're watching this HP Aruba Pensando announcement video. Yeah. Mhm.