Aruba Networks announced a sweeping update to its data center switching and support lineup with the launch of Aruba Fabric Composer, the CX 8360 switch series, and tighter integrations with company parent Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)

According to Steve Brar, senior director of product marketing at HPE Aruba, the announcement represents an expansion in Aruba’s product line that not only addresses regional data center, co-location, and edge switching, but provides new tools for orchestrating these network fabrics. “One of our best kept secrets is the fact we have a robust data center networking offering,” said Brar in an interview with SDxCentral.

Aruba’s Fabric Composer is a SDN controller that runs in a virtual machine (VM) and is designed to orchestrate and automate switch networking topologies at scales ranging from the edge to the corporate data center.

“This is a software-defined networking automation tool and orchestration tool really designed to automate away a lot of the complexity and manual operations involved in provisioning networks,” Brar said.

Aruba claims the offering is ideally suited for IT administrators that have traditionally managed compute, storage, and networking resources manually. Brar added that the technology also has deep extensibility, enabling customers to take advantage of existing orchestration layers such as those from VMware.

Launching alongside Aruba Fabric Composer are a new line of switches that offer port configurations ranging from 12 to 48 ports and scale from 1 Gb/s to 100 Gb/s. Like the rest of Aruba’s CX line, the new switches are running on the company’s AOS-CX network operating system and feature an embedded network analytics engine. However, Brar notes that the 8360 series switches are using Aruba's in house ASICs.

“These are unique in a couple of ways,” he said. “We’ve developed some unique form factors here. There’s a 16 port, 25 Gb/s; there’s a 12 port, 100 Gb/s, and really what we see these fitting into are some of the newer user cases around modern day data center connectivity.”

These form factors include edge and co-location deployments as well as the hybrid data center.

According to Brar, Aruba’s latest CX switches allow customers to deploy the right size switch for the application, adding in many cases a 48-port switch is overkill for a specific application like an edge deployment.

The final piece of Aruba’s data center push surrounds HPE servers built for specific workloads like SAP HANA, Cray Shasta and ClusterStor, Nutanix ProLiant DX, or HPE Nimble Storage. These racks feature Aruba switches and integration with Aruba Fabric Composer as well as hybrid cloud capabilities through HPE Greenlake.

Aruba claims these prebuilt data center racks are designed to make it easier for enterprises to modernize their data centers quickly and efficiently to take advantage of SDN and hybrid cloud.