LAS VEGAS – Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) executive Rami Rahim is obviously bullish on networking opportunities, telling a press audience at this week’s HPE Discover event that they are “a force-multiplier for massive data center and AI data centers.”

Rahim, who is EVP and GM of HPE Networking, noted that AI data center builders are mainly focused on three main challenges: space, power, and connectivity. While the first two have garnered most of the challenge glare, Rahim contends connectivity is an often-overlooked choke point.

“A cloud provider can spend hundreds-of-millions or billions on GPUs (graphic processing units), ultimately, and it is true that in a given data center the total investment in networking is a relatively small portion, it's maybe 10 to 15% of the aggregate investment that needs to go into the data center,” Rahim said. “But what people have come to the realization of is that if your network has congestion, has blocking issues, has reliability problems, what will happen is those GPUs that you spend hundreds-of-millions or billions on could be used at 75% of utilization, 50% utilization, 25% utilization. … Networking is truly become a force-multiplier for massive data center and AI data centers.”

Rahim added that this power-multiplier is a big reason behind his past claims of the Juniper Networks-enhanced HPE providing an “embarrassment of riches.”

“Juniper had already made significant investments in routing for DCI (data center interconnect) or scale-across, but scale-up is sort of a new paradigm,” Rahim said. “This is deeply integrated into computing and that is very difficult for a standalone networking company like Juniper on its own.”

That’s not to say that scale across is without its own challenges, with Rahim later adding that this connectivity is becoming more complex in scale-across deployments.

“Sometimes these scale-across networks are fairly simple, they're point-to-point, but increasingly scale-across has become a new core network with multipathing, and optimizations, and so forth, so that's a really an important part of our portfolio, and the business momentum there is amazing,” Rahim said.

Rahim also explained that the vendor is making progress toward its long-proffered self-driving network goal. The executive noted that in looking at all of the deployments of that technology and the ability for that technology to deal with “issues, incidents, network incidents that occur, what percentage of those incidents either remediated themselves or had the data ready for an operator with instant information about what that issue is … we’re now over 80%.”

“It used to be 50%, went to 60, 70. We are now over 80% of these issues either fully self-remediated or the answer is known immediately,” Rahim said. “It’s just a matter of trust of the operator enabling it go on its own.”

More security and the future of CPO

HPE this week also updated its secure access service edge (SASE) platform with a unified AI-native update designed to more easily converge networking and security toward accelerating zero trust adoption and also added a dedicated secure web gateway (SWG) tunnel to extend protection against web-based threats to more devices, including IoT devices.

However, analysts on site still questioned the need for HPE to further bolster its security posture in light of what rivals like Cisco are doing in that space. When questioned on that perceived deficiency, Rahim said the vendor is not sitting still.

“It comes down first to the ingredients that we have: firewalls, network access control, SSE (security service edge), SD-WAN, SASE solutions. We are putting a lot of pressure on ourselves to integrate … and we want security to be frictionless. We don't want a standalone product,” Rahim said. “Increasingly, the best security posture is achieved when you have the network detecting issues for you … and network blocking with policy enforcement for you, and that's the ultimate integrations that we are working on today. There is a lot of demand for our customers. We are absolutely putting the pressure on ourselves to execute, and … there will be milestones along the way.”

What might take more time is co-packaged optics (CPO). Rahim explained that Juniper Networks had previously done internal work on the optical networking technology “not because we felt like the market is ready, but we wanted to learn and we wanted to sort of prototype with some of our customers,” work that ended up to be “very valuable.”

“I do believe that CPO will become a thing and it’ll probably become a thing first in scale-out and then in scale-up, and because of the lessons that we have learned with the products and the prototypes that we built, we will absolutely be ready for that,” Rahim said.

As for when that readiness will be needed, Rahim deferred a direct guess but did tie it more to an economical decision rather than any technology development constraints.

“Nobody wants to do this just for fun,” Rahim said. “It comes down to the economics of that kind of deep integration versus not, because at the same time, while there's these sort of advancements in CPO, there are also advancements that are happening in the pluggable optics themselves, and so there's going to be a little bit of an interesting dynamic that's going to evolve over the next year or so that we have to stay very much on top of.”