At this year’s Aruba Atmosphere event Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced the next generation of its cloud management platform, HPE Aruba Networking Central, and new network-as-a-service (NaaS) capabilities on the HPE GreenLake platform.

The next generation of HPE Aruba Networking Central will leverage artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps), providing AI-powered full-stack insights for enhanced root cause analysis (RCA), impact assessment and recommendations.

“We call it next-generation Aruba Central,” said Aruba VP Larry Lunetta. “It's being redesigned and introduced to really streamline, update and provide more assists for the network administrators, the network team to manage complex, highly distributed edge to cloud networks.”

AI will be applied for troubleshooting, optimization and will make recommendations for network administrators to act on, Lunetta added. Automation will also assist in determining what's on the network.

“If you can't see what's on the network, you can protect it. So we have AI-based tools to find and to fingerprint IoT devices as they come on to the network,” he told SDxCentral. “It's this mix of troubleshooting, optimization and we have examples where we can make recommendations on changing for example, settings and access points to change power levels and things like that.”

Aruba claims the AI enhancements can deliver up to 25% more performance out of the network. Aruba Central now runs on the HPE Green Lake cloud platform, which means it gets “the scale and the scope of HPE's global presence to provide these solutions,” Lunetta said.

In 2020, the vendor introduced the Aruba Edge Services Platform (ESP) to unify management for campuses, data centers, branches and remote workers, as well as automatically predict and fix issues at the network edge.

Lunetta said ESP is where AI started to “become practical” based on the amount of data that Aruba was acquiring and the wide range of applications that it was able to integrate with AI solutions. “The next generation of Central builds on that ESP foundation to deliver these new experiences, these streamlined experiences to make the network team more efficient,” he added.

The Aruba Central upgrade will also introduce a new “time travel” view of the network that allows recovery to a specific point. According to Lunetta, with time travel network managers can go back up to seven days down to a minute and select a specific minute to see the status of the network as it existed at that point in time.

Additionally, the vendor has also abstracted device configuration on the next-generation Aruba Central and put in a standard graphical user interface that works across access points – including SD-WAN and switches.

“Organizations have skills shortages, and it's hard to get experts who can configure specifically SD-WAN or switches with CLI or access points. The whole idea is to up level the opportunities for the networking team to do that without having to be experts in each of those areas,” Lunetta said.

New NaaS capabilities will allow Aruba’s customers and channel partners to acquire, deploy and manage networks on the HPE GreenLake platform with a monthly subscription.

There's “a lot of confusion around what NaaS is among enterprise customers,” Lunetta said, adding the Agile NaaS offering is a “strategic framework to help customers understand what their business requirements are and how they can be served by a NaaS solution.”

According to Gartner’s Andrew Lerner, “NaaS is a model for networking products that delivers network functionality as-a-service.” Lerner said NaaS offerings must be self-service with on-demand usage; have the ability to scale up and down; use an opex billing model; and be consumption-based via a metered metric (such as ports, bandwidth or users), not based on network devices and appliances.

“NaaS offerings may include elements such as network switches, routers, gateways and firewalls,” Lerner noted in a blog.

Agile NaaS is Aruba’s framework for helping customers navigate and implement NaaS and includes tools to develop a NaaS strategy, support for a range of acquisition, deployment, and management models.

“The whole point of this is to give customers choice -- choice in the acquisition process, deployment and operations because a lot of people try and reduce NaaS to a formula or a one size fits all, and we know that that's just not the case. One size doesn't fit all,” Lunetta said.

“Agile NaaS is a framework for the vendor to have a conversation with each customer or partner to have a conversation with a customer across these dimensions. And when we're done, the customer and us will have a pretty good idea of what the right NaaS solution is for them.”

He added that Aruba customers can mix and match traditional network management with the as-a-service model, even doing so by specific project (ie. Home Depot uses traditional network management for its data centers and offices but Aruba-managed NaaS for its stores.)

“You're gonna see this more and more as customers dip their toes into network-as-a-service.” Lunetta said.

Once Aruba and its customers have figured out which NaaS solution is right for them, they are able to choose from NaaS service packs available on HPE Greenlake for Aruba networking. The vendor today announced new service pack capabilities added to HPE GreenLake for Aruba networking that enable partners to bundle their design and delivery services for their customers with a monthly NaaS technology subscription.

A new Network Policy NaaS service pack, based on Aruba’s ClearPass network access control (NAC) solution adds a new standardized NaaS network policy offering to complement eight previously introduced wired, wireless, and SD-Branch NaaS service packs from 2022. The new Network Policy service pack will be available for order starting in the third quarter of HPE’s 2023 fiscal year.

“The unifying theme here is the idea that the network is now a business critical resource and organizations are recognizing as they digitally transform that the network is really a fundamental building block on which they need to optimize not only their business outcomes, but also using their staff and IT resources more effectively,” Lunetta said.