HPE Aruba Networking Central: Now With Virtual Private Cloud, On-Premises Deployment Options

The new deployment options for the HPE Aruba Networking Central platform is “game-changing” for a lot of customers and expands what partners can do for their compliance-constrained clients, which are increasing in number, one solution provider told CRN.

HPE Aruba Networking’s flagship network management platform can now support four distinct deployment options as demand grows for local control of networks and enterprise data.

The networking giant is also baking more AI into the platform with an AIOps capability for continuous monitoring via a fabric of AI assistants and expanding its full-stack network observability through the addition of a new one-year subscription powered by OpsRamp technology, which HPE acquired in 2023, for expanded observability.

HPE Aruba Networking Central now comes in four different deployment options, including virtual private cloud and on-premises, as well as the existing cloud-delivered SaaS and Network as a Service models. These new options will help enterprises and government entities satisfy regulatory constraints and adherence to stringent security standards such as GDPR, FINRA, and SOX, according to the company.

HPE Aruba is expanding its virtual private cloud deployment model to support more cloud providers based on specific customer requirements, or host customers itself in a “cloud of one” rather than a multi-tenant environment, said Alan Ni, senior director, edge marketing for HPE Aruba.

“This is an evolving area where we’re expanding, and we’re seeing the demand expand,” Ni told CRN.

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“One of the things that we’ve always seen, but more recently has accelerated, has been organizations that have specific regional, local or regulatory data sovereignty or data protection requirements,” Ni said. This is where HPE’s “unmatched” deployment flexibility of the Central platform is important, he added.

HPE said that its platform can be deployed in more ways than any network management platform on the market right now.

The new deployment options for the Central platform are “game-changing” for a lot of customers, said Andy Segal, president of Albertson, N.Y.-based solution provider and HPE Aruba partner Vandis.

“A lot of customers have to segregate data because they can’t have data in public clouds. Especially virtual private cloud, it allows you to maintain data isolation and compliance if you are required to for compliance purposes, so it just gives organizations a lot more flexibility,” he said. “If you think about it, who are the organizations that are the most constrained by compliance issues? It’s large organizations. This makes it much, much more doable for them.”

The new options expand what Vandis can do for its customers, especially as more and more clients become compliance-constrained, Segal said.

“It’s a big feature and a big deal. Having those options really makes a difference,” he said.

The company has also increased its global points of presence (PoP) to 15 locations over the course of the last few months, with dedicated instances in the U.S., Canada, the E.U., Middle East and Africa, Asia Pacific, and China.

“A lot of this is driven by being where our customers need us to be able to access a cloud-based service,” HPE’s Ni said. “The PoPs are growing because of this universal theme that we’re seeing in terms of end customers and even our partners on a global basis that need to have an offering where the customers need us to be.”

AI, Observability Updates

HPE Aruba Networking Central’s AIOps capabilities are being boosted with the addition of 20 different, always-on, AI-powered automated network assistants that can monitor, diagnose, and flag optimization alerts to network operators when performance issues are discovered.

“We’re just getting more and more sophisticated in terms of what the AI has been trained to do and identify,” Ni said.

The company also revealed that it has greatly expanded the size of its data lake and telemetry capabilities, which now pull from more than 5.2 million devices managed, up from 4 million in 2024, and more than 2 billion network devices served, representing a 30 percent and 100 percent year-over-year annualized growth rate respectively.

“We’ve been super pleased. Frankly, shocked us with the amount of growth that we’re seeing on the platform,” Ni said. “It’s just a really formidable data trove.”

Owning one of the industry’s largest data lakes helps power HPE Aruba Networking Central’s advanced AI capabilities and models, while helping the platform differentiate from the competition, Ni said.

On the observability front, the new one-year subscription of the HPE Aruba Networking Central OpsRamp Extension license expands on the update to the platform six months ago when HPE Aruba Central gained AI capabilities that allowed for third-party monitoring of customer networks, including networks equipped with competitor gear from the likes Cisco Systems, Juniper Networks and Palo Alto Networks.

HPE Aruba Networking Central now also has gained telemetry to boost Microsoft Teams Quality of Experience for voice and video calls with a native Teams integration, the company said.

“Now we’ll be sharing and pulling in telemetry from Microsoft Teams to be able to understand the performance of the entire call end to end, along with things like call record data, etc. with the goal of bringing all this edge context and observability specifically into Central,” Ni said.