Federal agencies have successfully pushed applications and workloads to the cloud, but a hybrid approach will continue to be a reality for the foreseeable future. A cloud-first mindset is also opportunity for federal IT leaders to make strategic decisions about how to optimize their on-premises data centers.
Infrastructure automation should play a major role in data center modernization projects. Manually provisioning compute, storage or network resources can slow the pace of service delivery supporting critical government services or operations. IT teams have long struggled to use separate management tools for different infrastructure elements, which only increases complexity, limits visibility and makes security more challenging.
Even within the network domain itself, IT teams typically need different tools to manage the campus, branch, and core networks. Repeated manual, hand-crafted changes risk human error and lead to configuration drift over time, even when done by highly skilled engineers. As a result, infrastructure teams spend hours responding to requests to support a new application or mission objective, while stakeholders become frustrated by the delay.
It’s time to think about a different way
Aruba takes a different architectural approach to campus core and data center networking—one that empowers agency IT teams to use intelligent automation to speed infrastructure provisioning and simplify operations.
At the heart of our architecture is Aruba AOS-CX, our modern, microservices-based switching operating system, which runs on Aruba CX campus and data center switches. Operations are identical across Aruba CX switch models, which lays the foundation for intelligent automation. IT teams can use Aruba Fabric Composer, our software-defined orchestration solution, to simplify and accelerate provisioning for network resources as well as compute and storage.
With Aruba Fabric Composer, agency IT teams can:
- Simplify infrastructure operations. IT teams can use Aruba Fabric Composer to orchestrate sets of CX switches as a cohesive network fabric, automating and simplifying day-to-day operations. Instead of complex command-line configurations, IT teams can use an intuitive, point-and-click interface to set up workflow automation. Recurring management tasks can be automated, resulting in faster network deployments and server-side provisioning. The risk of human error is reduced.
- Accelerate infrastructure provisioning. IT teams can use Aruba Fabric Composer to reduce the design and configuration complexities associated with cloud-scale data center fabrics, including leaf-spine architectures for the physical network and EVPN-VXLAN for the virtual overlay. Network operations staff don’t need deep expertise in network fabric design, configuration, and protocols to make changes, and that frees up skilled engineers for high-value work. Aruba Fabric Composer can discover and visualize virtual network infrastructure. It can also respond to virtual machine lifecycle events and configuration changes, automatically making the appropriate fabric adjustments. IT staff can not only configure Aruba CX switches through Aruba Fabric Composer, but they can also extend and manage connectivity across their IT estate, including VMware, HPE GreenLake, and HPE ProLiant Servers.
- Increase visibility and control. With Aruba Fabric Composer, IT teams gain end-to-end visibility, making it easier to quickly solve connectivity or performance issues before the users’ quality of experience or mission objectives are impacted. Aruba Fabric Composer supports the move to Zero Trust security by giving IT teams greater control over both security policy and network microsegmentation.
Modernize and automate your data center with Aruba
Modernizing a data center can be a major undertaking. But modernizing with Aruba intelligent, data center network solutions, agency teams can deliver resilient services with greater operational efficiency and ease.
See Aruba Fabric Composer in action. Watch the demo.
