Aruba has designed a new software-defined networking (SDN) tool to allow multi-site customers to manage their networking in a simpler and more streamlined way.

The HPE-owned company’s new SD-Branch links SD-WAN, wired and wireless networking infrastructure together, routing them all through Aruba’s new Branch Gateways so they can be managed and controlled through the cloud-based Aruba Central management platform.

In addition, the inclusion of Aruba’s ClearPass policy manager means network policy can be created and enforced remotely and automatically, without administrators having to manually provision equipment or conduct on-site maintenance. For Aruba, the aim is to help businesses cut out inefficiency, speed up deployment and reduce networking complexity.

“First and foremost, this software-defined branch solution and architecture significantly increases IT’s ability to respond in real time to the business’s need to be agile,” Aruba’s Lissa Hollinger said at HPE Discover 2018 yesterday, citing the fact that many customers have 10 to 12 IT staff managing up to 3,000 branches.

“You can imagine how complex that is if you don’t have a centralised way to automate deployment and provisioning and monitoring, so this significantly increases IT’s ability to be agile and to focus on more strategic initiatives as opposed to just keeping the lights on,” she added.

Simple, zero-touch provisioning is another key benefit of the service, and vice-president and general manager of Aruba’s cloud and SD-Branch division, Kishore Seshadri, noted that this is a critical feature for many customers.

“If you own a thousand cafes or a thousand restaurants, and you want to deploy these solutions,” he explained, “previously you could do this across two or three years – now we’re asked to be able to do this in two or three months. You have to assume that there is no technical resource on the ground, there is no IT team on the ground, so it’s just expected that you will ship a device to the location, somebody unpacks it, plugs it in; it just has to work.”

As with any networking technology, security is a critical feature of SD-Branch. Aruba has partnered with network security vendors including Zscaler, Palo Alto Networks and Check Point to offer cloud-based firewall protections, in addition to the Branch Gateway’s built-in firewall and deep packet inspection tools.

The new branch gateway units also offer context awareness, allowing for dynamic traffic optimisation to ensure maximum quality of service for bandwidth-hungry business-critical devices and applications. This also feeds into policy-based routing tools that ensure organisations can specify exactly which services they want to prioritise.

SD-Branch is hardware-agnostic, in that customers do not necessarily need to deploy Aruba’s switches or access points in order to make use of it – although the company claimed that customers may be limited by the features offered by third-party vendors.

In order to deploy the new package, customers will need to be subscribed to Aruba Central, with a headend gateway in their datacentre to manage traffic and a branch gateway unit in each physical location. Prices start at $1,495 each for the physical gateway hardware, as well as $450 in subscription fees per gateway per year.

HPE is set to spend $4 billion on edge computing over the next four years, underlining the company’s strategic shift away from its traditional datacentre roots.

Speaking at the company’s annual conference, HPE Discover, CEO Antonio Neri yesterday revealed that his company would invest heavily to support the collection, processing and analysis of data outside of datacentre or cloud environments. This investment will be focused on research and development in the pursuit of new products and services in areas including automation, AI, edge computing and security.

“The edge is where we interact with our customers. That’s what the edge is all about,” Neri told attendees. “Actually, the edge is anywhere technology gets put into action. And I believe the edge is the next big opportunity for all of us.

“This next revolution requires what we call an ‘edge-to-cloud’ architecture. A world with millions of clouds distributed everywhere – that’s the future as we see it. And HPE is uniquely positioned to drive this next revolution.”

This move is a direct response to the explosion in data that has occured over the last few years, Neri said, explaining that a large portion of data that is generated at the edge is still being lost or wasted because businesses do not have the capacity to process it, and that the forthcoming development of smart cities, driverless cars and other tech innovations will only increase the amount of data being generated.

“The reality is that two years from now, we are going to generate twice the amount of data we have generated in the entirety of human history,” Neri said, “and that’s an incredible opportunity. Data that actually has the potential value to drive insights and actions across our world. To change our lives and our businesses.”

One example Neri cited was Tottenham Hotspur FC, which is using an ‘edge-to-cloud solution’ delivered by HPE’s PointNext and Aruba divisions to deliver high-speed networking for fans, combined with personalised interactive experiences and new merchandising opportunities.

HPE isn’t the only company that’s putting significant store by edge computing, though; its main rival, Dell Technologies, is also investing in the area through subsidiary VMware. The company launched a suite of new IoT packages for edge compute use cases at this year’s Mobile World Congress, powered by Dell’s hyper-converged infrastructure.

“We believe the enterprise of the future will be edge-centric, cloud-enabled and data-driven,” Neri finished. “Those that can act with the speed and agility on a continuous stream of insights and knowledge will win. That’s why our strategy is to accelerate your enterprise from edge to cloud, helping connect all of your edges, all your clouds, everywhere.”

HPE has launched a new consumption-based hybrid cloud-as-a-service offering, designed to help customers manage costs and reduce complexity within their hybrid IT infrastructure deployments.

Offered under the company’s IT-as-a-service umbrella brand GreenLake, HPE GreenLake Hybrid Cloud is a managed service that allows customers to more efficiently consume cloud services and on-premise infrastructure as part of a long-term monthly cost rather than a large upfront investment.

GreenLake Hybrid Cloud customers can have their cloud infrastructure – both public and private – designed, configured and deployed by HPE, and then maintained, supported and optimised on an ongoing basis. The company is utilising technology and capabilities from its PointNext consulting division, as well as its recent acquisitions, Cloud Technology Partners and RedPixie.

Similar to the company’s GreenLake Flex Capacity consumption model, the service uses metering services under HPE-acquired cloud monitoring firm Cloud Cruiser. Customers can closely monitor the costs of their cloud services and set limits on spending, scaling up and down as necessary.

Scott Ramsey, vice president of consumption and managed services for HPE PointNext, said this model can save organisations considerable amounts of money compared to traditional infrastructure procurement models.

“We’ve got strong empirical evidence from our 540 [existing GreenLake] customers that we’ve got that you’re total cost of ownership is in the region of 25% to 30% lower in this type of model,” he told Cloud Pro. “If you’re a customer or a business, and you’re not interested in something that can save you 25% to 30% total cost of ownership, then I’ve got to question what you’re doing, to be honest.”

The service brings with it benefits in a number of areas, according to HPE. Aside from the obvious cost control benefits that come from a consumption-based model, GreenLake Hybrid Cloud also allows businesses to trim additional operation costs by reducing the need to train IT staff in deploying and maintaining cloud infrastructure, the vendor claimed. In addition, HPE said it reduces the burden these tasks place on IT staff, freeing them up to work on projects that can deliver more practical business value.

“This model with HPE GreenLake Hybrid Cloud allows us to take out that heavy lifting that isn’t really about driving innovation in the business, but is about operating the underlying infrastructure,” explained John Treadway, senior vice president of Cloud Technology Partners. “It’s not the most value-adding thing that an IT organisation should be focused on. It should be focused on solutions to drive revenue growth and to provide analytics in business decision-making. Us taking that on allows the clients to actually be faster.”

HPE has also used the set of internal rules that it developed as part of its acquisition of Cloud Technology Partners – which PointNext SVP Ana Pinczuk said covers some 1,000 regulatory and compliance standards – to build compliance management capabilities into GreenLake Hybrid Cloud, which will supposedly allow customers to automate much of the work that goes into ensuring compliance.

The new service supports public cloud deployments on Microsoft Azure and AWS, and private cloud infrastructure via Microsoft Azure Stack and HPE ProLiant for Azure Stack, all of which is managed by HPE OneSphere, the company’s over-arching management layer.

“For some of our customers, their hybrid strategy is really Azure on and off-premise,” said Ric Lewis, senior vice president and general manager for HPE’s cloud division. “But what some customers don’t realise is Microsoft Azure Stack and Microsoft Azure are pretty separate. They run the same kind of code on the same base, but it’s not like you can move things back and forth, and it’s difficult to manage between the two.”

“With GreenLake Hybrid Cloud and some of the management and analytics that we lift from HPE OneSphere, we can help customers stitch those two fairly separate things together, regardless of the fact that they run the same thing; at least they’ll look like they’re part of the same estate and we can make that seamless for customers.”

Customers using HPE hardware for their private cloud deployments can also take advantage of seamless automatic management and provisioning via the company’s OneView on-prem automation product, which can be controlled directly via an integration with OneSphere.

However, those using alternative hardware vendors to power their infrastructure aren’t left out in the cold; OneSphere is vendor-agnostic, meaning that you can use GreenLake Hybrid Cloud to manage your infrastructure regardless of whether you’re using servers from HPE, Dell EMC, Broadberry, Lenovo or anyone else.

Although customers have a wealth of choice in terms of the infrastructure hardware they want to use to run their private clouds, they are more limited when it comes to which clouds they can actually run.

Out of the box, GreenLake Hybrid Cloud only supports AWS and Azure public cloud deployments, and despite Lewis assuring reporters that HPE is actively working on adding support for Cloud28+ partners, Ramsey told Cloud Pro that in the immediate future, the company won’t be adding support for any additional providers.

“We’ve picked the two giants of the industry to work with,” he said, “and both have a lot of strength in the enterprise arena. Over the next 12 months or so, I would say our focus will be going more vertical with those guys, getting stronger value propositions with AWS and Azure.”

“For now, our roadmap is really focused in upon making sure that the AWS and the Azure experience gets better and richer, so we’ll add more features, more functionality, more capability, more tooling into that as we go forward. That’ll be where our primary focus is going to be.”

He did, however, point out that this only applies to GreenLake Hybrid Cloud when viewed as a turnkey solution – if customers come to HPE with specific requirements that can best be met by a local Cloud28+ provider, this will be taken into consideration.

He also stated that the addition of Google Cloud support as standard was “a distinct possibility”, but said that he had no specific plans to include it. “They’re fundamentally still pretty much in the consumer space from a cloud perspective,” he said, “[but] they’re the obvious next big player that we’d want to think about working with.”

Similarly, while Azure Stack is the only private cloud infrastructure that is officially supported out the box, Ramsey confirmed that HPE is happy to support other providers if a customer has specific needs.

“We have the GreenLake solutions – which I always describe as the ‘turnkey’ solutions, where we give it to you and it’s ready to go out the box – but if a customer says to me ‘I want to run an OpenStack private cloud’, we will solution that for them, and we have done that [for some customers].”

Microsoft is under pressure from the tech community to terminate a contract it holds with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), in light of the department’s family separation policy.

A blog post published in January has resurfaced in the last couple of days, detailing how Microsoft “is proud to support” ICE’s IT innovation aims through its Azure Government platform.

A protest is taking place later today outside Microsoft’s DC office about the issue, and employees are being encouraged to speak out online.

Erica Baker, a senior engineering manager at Patreon, said on Twitter: “Friends who work for @Microsoft, FIGHT THIS. Make the biggest noise imaginable about it.

“Don’t fall for the “all companies take government contracts” spin. Your company has THIS contract and is *proud* of it.”

A spokesperson for Microsoft said it’s not working with ICE or US Customers and Border Protection “on any projects related to separating children from their families”, and doesn’t believe its Azure services are supporting such projects.

“As a company, Microsoft is dismayed by the forcible separation of children from their families at the border,” the spokesperson added.

“We urge the administration to change its policy and Congress to pass legislation ensuring children are no longer separated from their families.”

Its original blog post, written by Tom Keane, general manager at Microsoft, read: “ICE’s decision to accelerate IT modernization using Azure Government will help them innovate faster while reducing the burden of legacy IT.

“The agency is currently implementing transformative technologies for homeland security and public safety, and we’re proud to support this work with our mission-critical cloud.”

This section was reportedly removed from the blog by an employee earlier in response to the social media outburst, but was later re-inserted.

Picture: Bigstock

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has pledged to create 1,000 technology jobs in Ireland over the next two years after opening a new office in Dublin yesterday.

The new 170,000 square foot building will offer highly skilled roles for software development, network development, data centre and systems engineers and security and big data specialists for AWS.

There will also be tech job openings at the company’s other sites in north county Dublin, Blanchardstown, and Tallaght, as AWS looks to utilise the talent in the country.

“Today, we have more than 2,500 Amazon employees in Ireland supporting customers from Ireland and around the world,” said Mike Beary, AWS Ireland country manager.

“There is an abundance of talent in Ireland which helped us to exceed our talent growth targets ahead of schedule. Ireland is a great place to do business, the country’s creative culture and diverse pool of technical skills make it an ideal location for our rapidly expanding business.”

AWS has a long history with Ireland, having first set up an office in the country in September 2004. Today more than 1,000 of AWS’s Ireland empoyees are engaged in data centre operations.

In addition to creating new jobs, AWS has collaborated with the Institute of Technology Tallaght (IT Tallaght) to fund a bursary programme for 20 students to study to become data centre technicians.

“Amazon has a long history of success in Ireland and today’s announcement is a testament to Ireland’s highly-skilled, diverse workforce,” Martin Shanahan, CEO of IDA Ireland, a government body designed to encourage foreign private investment in the country, added.

“Tech talent and investment are fundamental to our country’s continued growth, and companies like Amazon are bringing even more energy, vision, innovation and good jobs to Ireland. We are proud to support these companies, who invest in our talent and the future of our economy, and create new opportunities for the country to succeed.”

Picture: AWS