HPE Aruba Networks Intros GenAI Trained On Networking Giant’s Own 'Massive' Data Lake

'Good AI requires good data and good data lakes require a ton of telemetry. We're one of the big market leaders [and] we're very confident we have one of the largest specific data lakes … When we bring Juniper into the fold, that's more telemetry,' HPE Aruba’s Alan Ni says of the company’s GenAI announcement.

The HPE Aruba Networking Central platform is getting infused with "purpose-built" generative AI to improve network performance, accuracy, and security for partners and end customers.

The announcement comes as HPE puts a greater emphasis on AI-powered networking as it plans to acquire Juniper Networks for $14 billion later this year for Juniper's renowned Mist AI engine.

HPE on Tuesday announced it was expanding its AIOps network management capabilities by integrating its own GenAI Large Language Models (LLMs) inside HPE Aruba Networking Central, a cloud-based network platform that's been around since 2014 when it was first introduced to manage Wi-Fi environments from the cloud. Hosted on the HPE GreenLake Cloud Platform today, HPE Aruba has been consistently evolving this platform over the last decade and thanks to its SaaS nature, partners and end customers reap the benefits right away, said Alan Ni, senior director, edge marketing for HPE Aruba.

The latest update is a substantial leap for the Central platform, Ni said.

HPE Aruba Networking is taking a different approach to GenAI within its management tools than its competitors, while taking advantage of HPE Aruba Central's massive data lake, said Ni (pictured above).

Unlike other GenAI networking approaches that rely on public LLMs, HPE Aruba is training and tuning its own, "curated" large language models (LLMs) on questions that it would anticipate an Aruba Central user asking. This will help the company serve up HPE Aruba-specific answers with sub-second response times, he said.

The self-contained set of LLM models have been designed with a focus on search response times, accuracy, and data privacy, the company said.

"Good AI requires good data and good data lakes require a ton of telemetry. We're one of the big market leaders [and] we're very confident we have one of the largest specific data lakes," Ni said. "When we bring Juniper into the fold, that's more telemetry. Us joined together, this is one area where we're going to have even more data [and] more diverse environments to power these specific models."

The HPE Aruba Central platform's data lake contains telemetry data from around 4 million network managed devices, which include access points, switches, and edge devices. These network devices are providing connectivity to more than 1 billion unique customer endpoints, Ni said.

"This [speaks to] the amount of telemetry that we have, and that Telemetry is super important,” he said.

The new GenAI LLM function is being incorporated into HPE Aruba Networking Central’s AI Search feature, which will complement existing machine learning (ML)-based AI within the Central platform, the company said. The GenAI search capabilities are available to all Central licensing tiers.

"I think we have a great story to share in terms of not just the technology and its capability, but how it's actually how's it actually manifesting itself in real world critical infrastructure products like networking,” Ni said.

HPE Aruba Networking's commitment to secure networking carries over into Tuesday's announcement with a security-first approach to Personal and Customer Identifiable Information (PII/CII). The LLM’s are “sandboxed” within HPE Aruba Networking Central so PII/CII data is removed, HPE Aruba said.

"We can really ensure that we don't have PII or CII leaving our data lakes," Ni said.

HPE on Tuesday also announced that Verizon Business was adding HPE Aruba Networking Central to its managed services portfolio.