Securing and managing communication within modern distributed environments is a task only hyperscalers have had the resources to accomplish.

But the release of the Aruba CX 10000, the industry’s first silicon-embedded distributed services switch, is set to bring the security and management capabilities of the hyperscalers into existing enterprise data center environments.

“The whole goal of developing this technology was to be somewhat disruptive,” said Bob Laliberte (pictured), senior analyst and practice director at Enterprise Strategy Group. “How do I distribute the services that are needed to help my applications, to protect my applications closer to the applications themselves?”

Laliberte spoke with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the Aruba and Pensando Announce New Innovations event. They discussed how all organizations can benefit from a distributed services architecture that simplifies, accelerates and scales data center and cloud infrastructures. (* Disclosure below.)

Top-of-rack installation takes away hyperscaler advantage

With the CX 10000, Aruba and Pensando have “hit that Goldilocks spot of being able to provide distributed services without impacting the application performance,” according to Laliberte. The key is the blending of Pensando’s distributed services portfolio with an Aruba top-of-rack switch managed under the Aruba Fabric Composer.

“You’ve got a simplistic way to be able to provision, configure and update and assign policies to all those great Pensando stateful services in a top-of-rack switch for an existing data center environment,” he said.

This enables customers to cheaply and simply deploy distributed services into their existing environment in a minimally disruptive way. Security is increased, with the zero-trust policy of “never trust, always verify” able to be applied from east-to-west inside the data center, as well as out to the edge. This means that even if an attacker manages to penetrate the data center perimeter, the malware or ransomware will be prevented from spreading through the organization.

Summarizing his key takeaways from the Aruba-Pensando announcement, Laliberte said that the CX 10000 “provides the benefits of improving security, of improving performance and user experience, all while making sure that you can scale and do it simply through a single interface through the Aruba fabric controller.”

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: Bob Laliberte