HPE Aruba boosts observability, third-party management capabilities

HPE Aruba is expanding the capabilities of Networking Central, its cloud-based management platform for administering and managing all aspects of an Aruba wired and wireless customer infrastructure. Among the upgrades are an improved network device configuration engine, expanded network observability features, and a broader menu of AI-generated, network trained and tuned optimization models.

To ease the often tedious job of network and device configuration, the device management package in HPE Aruba Networking Central now includes a common configuration model that simplifies Aruba’s wired, wireless, and gateway configuration tasks by letting customers build tools with Python, Ansible, or Terraform, according to Alan Ni, senior director of edge marketing for HPE Aruba. It also includes a menu of more than 90 new APIs customers can organize from a single console, Ni said.

“We support tons of different network components, from switches and routers to IoT devices, and that requires customers to configure each family of devices separately, which means three different APIs to write to and three different pushes to update and provision those device classes across the network,” Ni said. “Now we’ve collapsed that down [so users can update] those devices from a single API. And now, from a single push, we can provision everything, which reduces configuration errors and eases management of different device types across the enterprise.”