Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s (HPE) Aruba intelligent edge business grew 17% year over year to $799 million during the second quarter of 2021 and provided a continued boost to the vendor’s overall earnings.

HPE reported Q2 revenue of $6.7 billion, up 11% from a year ago, and an annualized revenue run rate (ARR) of $678 million, up 30%. The company also reported net earnings of $259 million, or 19 cents a share, compared with a net loss of $821 million, or 64 cents a share, a year ago.

And while HPE’s overall Q2 earnings beat Wall Street’s estimates, its Aruba edge services business clearly stole the show.

HPE’s edge-as-a-service products grew triple digits year over year and represent “a meaningful contributor to HPE's overall ARR,” CEO Antonio Neri said on a call with investors.

The Aruba Edge Services platform — this is HPE’s secure access service edge (SASE) platform, which includes Aruba networking and security technologies as well as SD-WAN from its $925 million Silver Peak acquisition — counts “well over 100,000 customers” and adds 150 new customers daily while connecting more than 1 billion devices, Neri added. “Aruba building identity network security is unique in the market and provides the ideal foundation for building a zero-trust and secure access service edge.”

In fact, 650 Group recently ranked HPE as a top SASE vendor, alongside Zscaler (HPE also uses Zscaler’s security capabilities for its SASE), Cisco, Fortinet, and Versa.

Additionally, HPE switching revenue, another part of its intelligent edge business, grew 17% year over year.

While they didn’t all report triple-digit growth, HPE’s other business units still ended Q2 with increased year-over-year revenue

High performance compute and mission critical systems revenue was up 13% to $685 million, up 13% from the prior-year period.

Compute revenue reached $3 billion, up 12%.

Storage revenue grew 5% year over year to $1.1 billion. This includes HPE’s Nimble storage, which increased 17% compared to a year ago, and HCI, which Neri said grew triple-digits. Additionally, all-flash storage arrays grew 20% from the prior-year period led by Primera, which was up triple-digits.

And finally, financial services revenue hit $839 million, up 1% year over year.

Looking ahead to the third quarter of 2021, HPE executives expects earnings per share between $0.38 to $0.44. And for the full-year fiscal 2021, HPE raised its earnings per share outlook to $1.82 to $1.94 from $1.70 to $1.88.