Learn about the benefits Aruba CX 8325 switches and storage fabrics bring to today’s mission-critical storage environments requiring greater consistency, predictability, and performance to keep pace with growing business demands.
Faster and efficient connectivity matters in data centers. Today, increasing demands being placed on storage networks are coming from flash-based and NVMe storage, not to mention faster servers. The need for scale-out storage – as well as trend
Aruba CX 8325 switches and storage fabrics – better together
For NVMe storage, predictable and reliable data delivery depends on fast and accurate data transmission. This starts with a high-performance network. Aruba CX 8325 Switch family is an enterprise-class game-changing solution, offering a flexible approach to dealing with new applications and security – plus meeting the demands of the mobile, cloud, and IoT era. The good news is it’s now also available for storage fabrics to help you keep pace with the intense workload demands.
Today's mission-critical storage environments require greater consistency, predictability, and performance to keep pace with growing business demands. Faced with explosive data growth, data centers need more IO capacity to accommodate the massive amounts of data, applications, and workloads. In addition to this surge in data, collective expectations for availability continue to rise. Users expect applications to be available and accessible from anywhere, at any time, on any device.
To meet these dynamic and growing business demands, your organization needs to rapidly deploy and scale up applications. Moving to higher virtual machine densities enables rapid deployment of new applications. Deploying flash storage helps these applications scale to support thousands of users. With the development of next-gen servers, increased server virtualization, adoption of flash-based storage and emerging technologies like NVMe, the existing networking infrastructure could become the bottleneck.
To increase agility, reduce expenses, and realize the full benefits of flash-based architectures, organizations need networks to deliver the performance required by today's server and storage environments. Also, storage networks are becoming increasingly important to application performance, which means they must be easier to administer and manage. By treating the network as a strategic part of a highly virtualized environment, organizations can increase optimization and efficiency even as they rapidly scale their environments. HPE Storage Networking portfolio is end-to-end qualified (SPOCK) with HPE’s comprehensive portfolio of Servers and Storage Arrays. It creates value for HPE customers with lower TCO, and quicker resolution to infrastructure problems – and that translates to dependable business continuity with OPEX savings.
Figure 1. Aruba CX 8325-32C (32 x 100GbE)
Figure 2. Aruba 8325 (48 x 25GbE + 8 x 100GbE)
Aruba CX 8325 Switches for Ethernet-based storage fabrics
Aruba’s CX switching portfolio is purpose-built for today’s digital world, meeting the most demanding use cases from access layer, to core, to data center. This powerful portfolio gives IT the flexibility to deploy a single cloud-native platform from edge access to the data center and includes intuitive management tools and distributed analytics that transform the IT network operator experience. Aruba’s CX Switch modern, cloud-native operating system simplifies IT end-to-end operations across an entire network. Aruba CX can help reduce configuration time, decrease risk, and speed troubleshooting through smart automation and embedded analytics.
Aruba CX 8325 switches serve the needs of the next generation core and aggregation layer, as well as emerging data center requirements at the top-of-rack (ToR) and end-of-row (EoR). They provide over 6.4Tbps of capacity, with line-rate Gigabit Ethernet interfaces including 1Gbps, 10Gbps, 25Gbps, 40Gbps, and 100Gbps.
AOS-CX – a modern software system
The Aruba CX 8325 Switch Series is based on AOS-CX, a modern, database-driven operating system that automates and simplifies many critical and complex network tasks. A built-in time series database enables customers and developers to utilize software scripts for historical troubleshooting, as well as analysis of past trends. This helps predict and avoid future problems due to scale, security, and performance bottlenecks.
AOS-CX software also includes Aruba Network Analytics Engine (NAE) and support for Aruba NetEdit. Because AOS-CX is built on a modular Linux architecture with a stateful database, the operating system provides the following unique capabilities:
- Easy access to all network state information allows unique visibility and analytics
- REST APIs and Python scripting for fine-grained programmability of network tasks
- A micro-services architecture that enables full integration with other workflow systems and services
- Continual state synchronization that provides superior fault tolerance and high availability
Figure 3. Aruba NETEDIT fabric visibility and analytics
Analytics and Automation with NETEDIT – coordinated network switch configuration, monitoring, and troubleshooting
Aruba NetEdit empowers IT teams to orchestrate the configuration of multiple switches with automation and analytics to ensure deployments are consistent, conformant, and free of errors. The automation workflows allow for changes without the overhead of programming by providing operators with a user-friendly, CLI-like interface. This arms IT teams with the power to smoothly coordinate end-to-end service roll outs, rapidly initiate network-wide changes, and ensure policy conformance after network updates.
With embedded analytics delivered from the Aruba Network Analytics Engine (NAE), this intelligent assistance and continuous validation assure that network-wide configuration changes are consistent and compliant, ultimately improving the overall health and security of the network. Key features include:
- Intelligent, error-free configuration with validation for consistency and compliance
- Simultaneous viewing and editing of multiple devices
- Customized validation tests for corporate compliance and network design
- Automated, large-scale configuration deployment without programming
- Advanced analytics and troubleshooting for faster issue resolution
- CLI-like interface with predictive assistance for complete operational simplicity—no new skills required
Workloads and use cases – edge-to-cloud transformation
Over the last 18 months, HPE has made major announcement focused on helping customers with their data-driven transformation from edge-to-cloud. HPE also introduced a visionary approach which is called Unified DataOps that is based on a unique architectural blueprint that brings together data-centric policies and automation, cloud-native control and operations, and AI-driven insights and intelligence. Powered by Data Services Cloud Console, HPE Alletra 9000 and 6000 enable organizations to run mission-critical applications. Aruba’s CX 8325 switches are now SPOCK validated with HPE Storage platforms. It creates value build confidence for customers with e2e HPE Validated Solution by HPE Labs.
Below you'll find Aruba CX 8325 switches aligned to storage types, followed by product SKU information.
Table 1. Aruba CX 8325 switches and storage portfolio
Table 2. SKU Information for Aruba switching for storage fabrics
More from HPE and Aruba
HPE and Aruba offer highly differentiated pre-engineered IT infrastructure solutions delivering a wide variety of HPE compute, storage, and networking products that span a range of offerings, including virtualization, vSAN, hyperconverged infrastructure, high-performance computing, and mission-critical systems, as well as Microsoft, SAP HANA, and VMware solutions.
Aruba CX 8325 switches are now end-to-end qualified (SPOCK) with HPE’s comprehensive portfolio of servers and storage arrays. This creates value for HPE customers through lower TCO and quicker resolution to infrastructure problems. This in turn translates into business continuity for customers with OPEX savings.
These ready-to-deploy, integrated IT data center solutions help simplify and speed IT service delivery while reducing the time, risk, and expertise needed to deploy complex solutions.
Also: You can read more on high-performance networking infrastructure in my previous blog: Data Center transformation: The road to 400Gbps and beyond
Meet Around the Storage Block blogger Faisal Hanif, Product Management, HPE Storage and Big Data
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