Aruba Networks announced a bevy of artificial intelligence operations (AIOps) and IoT enhancements to its Aruba Central management platform and Aruba Operating System (AOS) alongside new rugged and low-cost switching hardware at the Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Discover event today.

The updates are the latest step in HPE’s Edge Services Platform and promise to unify the company’s networking product stack under a single operating system and management platform.

Key among the updates is the shift to AOS 10 across the vendor’s product stack. When the updates go live this fall, they will bring “together all of the different architectures that we've had in the past into a single architecture with AOS 10,” said Steve Brar, senior director of product marketing at Aruba. “We feel this is really a key differentiator for Aruba relative to our competition in providing simplicity.”

With the latest update to Aruba Central, the vendor also aims to close the loop of its AIOps capabilities by allowing its machine learning-based insights to guide policy decisions and remediate issues without human intervention.

First introduced in 2020, Aruba Central AI Insights initially identified network issues, alerted IT operators of problems, and provided recommendations for remediation. “What we're doing in this release of Central is taking the first step towards self-healing AIOps, and extending … the ability to fix those issues automatically,” Brar said.

The service builds on an established network baseline and a data lake of similar customer data to identify issues.

“One third of network issues are still reported by end users, rather than being proactively identified by the IT department. Half of their time is spent reacting to these performance issues.” he said. “Of that, time can be better spent elsewhere in terms of supporting business initiatives.”

Using the service, Brar said a hospital operator was able to automatically remediate deteriorating WiFi performance. The service determined that the depredation was caused by a low signal-to-noise radio from passing devices and automatically adjusted the access point’s operating threshold to prevent them from connecting, he explained.

AIOps has become a key differentiator, especially among rivals Juniper Mist, Cisco Meraki, and Extreme Networks, which all offer some kind of AIOps functionality. However, many of these platforms stop short of automated remediation and rely on IT teams to greenlight any suggested fixes.

Aruba’s implementation does require some human interaction — at the least for the first time an issue is identified. However, subsequent events can then be handled automatically in most cases, Brar explained.

The update also adds new monitoring capabilities for IoT devices via the IoT Operations dashboard in Aruba Central. “In this latest release we have this new ability to provide visibility to IoT devices that are connected to the network through Central,” Brar said.

He explained that while it's possible to provide network visibility for IoT devices connected over WiFi, increasingly devices are connecting over other protocols like ZigBee and Bluetooth low energy.

This, Brar explained, makes it much more difficult to monitor and manage the hundreds or thousands of devices connecting to the network.

The new service connects to IoT devices through a virtual machine running on premises, and enables management via Aruba Central. “This is really bridging that gap for other IoT devices that are connecting on different types of mediums, and providing that visibility back into the network operations dashboard,” he added.

The update also introduces support for third-part integrations with services, like IFTTT, to further automate the management and integration of IoT devices across the network.

Complementing these features are two new families of Aruba switches aimed at industrial environments and branch offices, respectively.

The Aruba CX 4100i is a family of ruggedized switches designed to withstand extreme operating environments, such as industrial IoT applications. “We've never had, from an HPE perspective, a kind of ruggedized switching platform. We do have outdoor APs, and now this is going to help us extend into new markets and address more customer use cases,” Brar said.

The 4100i-series switches support power-over-Ethernet, can operate at temperatures up to 70-degrees Celsius, and support Aruba’s dynamic zero-trust security functionality for device segmentation.

The Aruba CX 6000 family of switches offers customers a low-cost option for layer-2 networking for remote offices and small to midsized businesses. “It's a great option for for SMBs that want enterprise class connectivity but are, obviously, on a budget, or also for distributed enterprises with branch offices where they don't need advanced connectivity or advanced performance,” Brar said.

The enhancements to Aruba Central and both families of CX switches will launch this fall, and will available as a managed service or via HPE GreenLake.