Aruba Networks tapped data processing unit (DPU) vendor Pensando today to accelerate its latest switch series.

The CX 10000 is the first in a new series of what Aruba is calling a distributed-services switch, which combines traditional layer 2-3 switching with Pensando's Elba DPU. The vendor claims the appliance will open the door for enterprises to operate, scale, and secure their network infrastructure the same way hyperscalers have for years.

“We're the first vendor to integrate silicon into the device itself to perform not only Ethernet switch function, but those layer 4-7 functionalities,”  said John Gray, data center marketing lead at Aruba.

Large service and cloud providers have been using smartNICs for years to deal with the explosion of data caused by cloud migration, he explained.

“By eliminating legacy appliances and host software, enterprises can deliver 100x the scale and 10x the performance at a third the TCO of traditional approaches,” Pensando Chairman John Chambers said in a statement.

Thanks to the embedded DPU, Aruba's CX 10000 series switch can accelerate east-west firewalling, distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection, and encryption and telemetry services, Gray explained.

Enterprises that have to deploy any of those services in a separate hardware appliance, or that are building and deploying their own on-premises enterprise infrastructure, can benefit from this switch, he added. 

Aruba claims the switch enables users to extend a zero-trust architecture deeper into the data center.

“​​Customers that have an infrastructure upgrade requirement and are interested in extending zero trust in a way that they’re not doing [with] today’s east-west stateful services or east-west firewalls, is the specific use case that out of the box we will provide,” Gray added.

According to Will Townsend, principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, the switch "could be a game changer for stateful, software-defined service delivery, including security integration. The latter can not be understated given the current sophistication of bad actors.”

The new switch extends the partnership between Pensando and Aruba’s parent company Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE).

HPE announced the Pensando Distributed Services Platform for HPE Servers last year, which is a factory-supported option available in HPE ProLiant servers, Apollo systems, Edgeline Converged Edge systems, and as part of its Greenlake platform.

“We're already shipping one particular form factor of Pensando for our compute environment, but what we're doing here now is actually embedding that into our switching portfolio,” Gray said. 

The Aruba CX 10000 switches are available beginning January 2022.