This Next-Generation Data Center Fabric Is a Total Game Changer

As applications and IT services advance, scaling and modernizing data centers and meeting increased performance and security requirements grows more and more challenging. While networking technology has evolved over the past decade to provide higher-performing leaf-spine topologies, the unfortunate reality is that associated security and services architectures have not kept pace.

To compensate, many organizations use a stateless data center fabric, bolting on network services and applying complex service chaining — an inefficient solution that delivers sub-par results.

Enterprise organizations that want to compete on the same level as the hyperscalers must shift away from legacy architectures and embrace the next-generation data center fabric. This stateful architecture provides integrated infrastructure services required to secure and scale applications while improving performance and manageability.

Aruba and Pensando Systems have come together to innovate a new category of switches that enables organizations to create hyperscale-like environments in their existing data centers. The Aruba Distributed Services Switch is the game-changing, next-generation data center fabric organizations need to overcome legacy limitations and resolve security and performance issues.

East-West traffic has outgrown current-generation switching technologies

As technologies like edge computing advance, the volume of data requiring processing has surged, prompting enterprise data centers to repurpose traditional firewalls to segment the network. This leads to a number of issues. For example, when a host system in one cabinet needs to interface with another, traffic must be routed to the services host. Unfortunately, this service-chaining approach creates a hair-pinning or trombone effect, resulting in choke points that bog down the network, operations, and performance.

To accommodate traffic and capacity increases, more firewalls must be added, making scaling complex and expensive. The reality is that traditional firewalls designed for North-South traffic fall short when it comes to enforcing East-West traffic policies. Furthermore, traffic from microservices-based applications may never leave a physical host, leading to security blind spots that leave an organization vulnerable to threats.

The next-generation data center fabric: Aruba CX 10000 Series Switch

As East-West traffic continues to expand, organizations must rethink how traffic gets handled in the data center. And that’s what the folks at Aruba and Pensando have done. The Aruba CX 10000 Series Switch combines Aruba data center L2/3 switching technology with the Pensando Elba DPU.

Putting the Pensando Elba DPU on the switch itself addresses the shortcomings of the traditional data center by eliminating the need for manual service chaining. As the industry’s only programmable DPU, the Pensando Elba creates a centralized policy enforcement point and delivers a distributed stateful firewall for East-West traffic. The result is the industry’s only solution of its kind, completely revolutionizing data center fabric and delivering the improved security, performance, and scalability of hyperscalers at a fraction of the cost.

Benefits of the Aruba CX 10000 include:

• Zero-trust segmentation
• Micro- and macro-segmentation
• Pervasive telemetry
• Traffic flow optimization
• Increased bandwidth and performance
• Improved operational efficiency and scalability
• Accelerated provisioning
• Substantially reduced capex and opex costs

Streamline and secure your data center with Aruba CX 10000

What’s great about the Aruba CX 10000 is that it allows organizations to use their existing data center architecture. It provides a single pane of glass to manage everything in one place, simplifying administration, security, provisioning, and scaling. Plus, this cost-effective solution costs half to a third of traditional data center switching while delivering far superior performance and ROI.

To learn more about transforming your data center architecture with next-generation data center fabric, contact the experts at GDT.