Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, and Pensando Systems Inc. have recently announced a new programmable switch designed to enable a multitude of stateful functions on a switch platform.

The new addition to the Aruba portfolio is the CX 10000. It represents a significant advance in distributed services architecture for IT environments. What is under the hood to provide new levels of performance, scale and flexibility is the data processing unit, or DPU.

“The DPU is designed inherently to process state, to track stateful connections and stateful flows at very large scale without impacting performance,” said Shane Corban (pictured, right), director of technical product management at Pensando. “Two of these DPU components serve as the services foundation of the CX 10000. This is a platform with the next generation of architectures in mind, it is programmable at all layers of the stack, and that’s what makes it fundamentally different than anything else.”

Corban spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the Aruba and Pensando Announce New Innovations event. He was joined by William Choe (pictured, left), vice president of product management at Aruba, and they discussed how Pensando’s processor design contributed to the solution and the importance of providing a stateful solution for developers. (* Disclosure below.)

Enabling state and programmability

The new solution is a blend of Aruba’s CX switch technology and Pensando’s application-specific integrated circuit, or ASIC, processor design to provide a unique solution.

“We’re introducing the industry’s first distributed services switch,” Choe said. “The first configuration has 48 25-gigabit ports with 100 gigabit uplinks running Aruba CX cloud native operating system. It has Pensando ASICs and software inside enabling Layer 4 through 7 stateful services.”

The ability to run stateful services is a key element of this most recent announcement from the two firms. Cloud native developers need speed, and stateful applications can save client data from one session for use in another. The combination of programmability and state can be a major plus.

“A traditional switching platform regardless of how its deployed today in ASICs does not typically process and manage state like this,” Corban explained. “It’s hard to pull off because of the sheer amount of connections you need to track. You have to understand what’s happening with those connections at scale without impacting application performance.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Aruba and Pensando Announce New Innovations event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the “Aruba and Pensando Announce New Innovations” event. Neither Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE