HPE is busy driving “cross-pollination” between AIOps platforms.
Months after completing the Juniper acquisition, HPE announced that it has simplified IT operations with HPE Aruba Networking Central and HPE Juniper Networking Mist by creating a dual platform. The ultimate goal is to integrate the two AIOps platforms through what HPE executives call “cross-pollination” of capabilities from one platform to another, enabled by microservices, and work toward a self-driving network.
“The dual-platform design allows customers to choose their preferred control point, whether it’s Mist or Aruba Central, and seamlessly switch between platforms as their needs change, without requiring new hardware to be involved in that decision,” Rami Rahim, president and general manager of HPE’s networking business, said in a press conference.
However, Jim Fry, principal analyst at Omdia, says that while we are still a long way from achieving a truly self-driving network that is intelligent enough to automatically adjust to different conditions and reduce performance degradation and outages, integrated AI technologies, especially agent AI, are slowly moving us closer to achieving that goal.
“Both Juniper and Alba teams have been making independent progress in this direction, and now we can take full advantage of both teams’ AI capabilities to accelerate progress,” Frey said.
Gradual sharing of existing AI capabilities across Aruba Central and Juniper Mist includes:
- Mist’s large-scale experience model is now available in Aruba Central.
- Aruba Networking’s agent mesh technology is now available in Mist to enhance anomaly detection and root cause analysis.
- Mist employs organizational insights from Aruba Central and global network operations center views for a unified UX.
- New WiFi-7 access point models work with Aruba Central and Juniper Mist to help protect your buyers.
“While these consolidations are encouraging, the company has a long way to go. Ultimately, the company may need to prioritize one platform and commit to the other to maintain the pace of innovation,” said Shamus McGillicuddy, vice president of research at Enterprise Management Associates.
It’s time to switch
Rahim said HPE’s objective is to provide a secure AI-native network and is focused on two key market opportunities: AI for networks and networks for AI.
Newly added is the 100% water-cooled HPE Juniper Networking QFX5250 switch, which connects GPUs in the data center to high-performance Ultra Ethernet Transport-enabled switches. It is the first OEM switch built on Broadcom Tomahawk 6 silicon and advertises 102.4 Tbps of bandwidth. It is expected to be released in early 2026.
“The QFX switch temporarily positions HPE as a leader in AI networking, and I have no doubt that Cisco and Arista will introduce comparable switches, both based on the same Broadcom silicon, in the coming months,” said McGillicuddy.
HPE also announced the HPE Juniper Networking MX301, a multiservice edge router. The compact 1RU router delivers 1.6 Tbps of performance and 400G connectivity across inference, multiservice, metro, mobile backhaul, and enterprise routing environments. Rahim called this “absolutely ideal as a gateway to distributed inference cluster opportunities.”
“When building a new data center or upgrading an existing data center, [these products] Deliver the highest performance and capacity for routing and core switching. [HPE] I offer,” Frey said.
To meet industry demand for AI computing power, HPE is collaborating with Broadcom to deliver the first AMD Helios AI rack-scale architecture with integrated scale-up Ethernet networking.
“For the first time, we are introducing Ethernet into a new layer of the AI data center network,” said Rahim.
McGillicuddy commented that HPE’s development of the Ethernet scale-up switch for Helios expands its overall position as a leading AI networking provider.
“The combination of this component and the new QFX and MX products means that customers have a wide range of networking products available when building an AI data center, all based on the same network operating system with common tools for network management,” said McGillicuddy.
Kathleen Casey is the site editor at SearchCloudComputing. She plans and oversees the site, covering a variety of cloud topics including infrastructure management, development, and security.
