HN841: HPE Melds Apstra and Mist for Self-Driving Data Center Networks (Sponsored)

Drew Connery-Murray (0:00)

Welcome to Heavy Networking, I'm Drew Connery-Murray. My regular co-host, Ethan Banks, has been on PTO, but he'll be back to Packet Pushers HQ very soon. In the meantime, I am pleased to welcome Kyle Baxter and Sridhar Katere from sponsor HPE. We're going to talk about automating enterprise data center networks. Now, in particular, I'm going to probe our guests about how HPE is integrating its Apstra and Mist products to bring AIOps and self-driving capabilities into data center operations. We're going to talk about how HPE is leveraging the different strengths of each platform, how the integration can reduce the data collection tax that network operators have to pay, benefits like predictive analytics, and some real-world examples of how customers are using the platform, and more. Kyle Baxter is Director of Product Management at HPE, and Sridhar Katere is VP of Engineering. Gentlemen, welcome to the podcast.

First up, before we dive into the main topic, now that the HPE and Juniper merger acquisition is done, does that unlock possibilities for an enterprise data center operator that maybe weren't available before the integration? Are there other parts of the portfolio that they could hook into?

Kyle Baxter (1:01)

Absolutely. That's been one of the most exciting parts of now becoming part of HPE is the ability to have a full stack solution story and offering.

Back when we were individually part of Juniper, we were very networking centric. We like to think the network was the center of the world. It's funny enough in conversations now as being part of HPE, when we say the word data center, we got to clarify that we mean network. Otherwise, people will start thinking, are you talking about servers or storage or applications or AI workloads? What are you talking about?

That's been a transformation we've had to make as part of our thinking, but what it's done is truly accelerate what we can do and what we can offer for users by giving them a full stack solution. It's amazing how well the teams have integrated, how well our solutions have been able to be integrated as well and create real solutions. In just a matter of months, we've been able to truly integrate things like Morpheus for integrating workloads and automations into the networking side of the solution, as well as integrating to OpsRamp for a full stack observability solution. That way, when something gets detected goes wrong in the network, we can feed that into OpsRamp and it can then correlate that against what's going on in the server and storage world, to how that is impacting your applications. Because that's what's most important in a data center. We like to think it's the networking, being in the networking team. But the networking really facilitates the workloads, whether those are applications or AI training or inferencing jobs. That's what's critical and that's what's exciting about being part of HPE is we can provide that full stack solution to users out there.

Drew Connery-Murray (2:46)

Yeah. I think our audience probably believes, maybe rightly so, that the network is the center of the universe. There are other important galaxies and stars and stuff, so yes, I can see what that integration makes sense.

But we're going to be talking about data center networking, so I want to level set because we are talking about two key products in the portfolio for data center operations, Apstra and Mist. Can you give us a high level overview of each just so we have some context for the rest of the conversation?

Kyle Baxter (3:13)

Absolutely. Both were startups that were founded by industry experts that were at other big vendors, that looked at the solutions that were out there and what teams were building and decided there has to be a better way. Mist was looking at campus networks, we're looking at wired and wireless devices, and how do you manage that complexity when you have users trying to connect and devices and complex radio frequencies that you're trying to sort through in a wireless environment.

Mist was fully focused on how do we bring a better solution to there. They really pioneered AI operations or AI ops before AI became a household name. Well before. We got to mention it in every discussion now.

Sridhar Katere (3:58)

Yeah, absolutely.

Drew Connery-Murray (3:59)

They saw the curve early.

Kyle Baxter (4:01)

Yeah, they absolutely did. Apstra was also looking ahead of its time and what can we do in the data center for building it in a better way. Many people were still out there building complex EVPN VXLAN networks either by hand or automating it with some level of automation like things like Terraform or Ansible on top, which is really just scripting the CLI configuration. But what the team and the founders figured out is there's a better way of designing and managing networks with what we call intent-based networking. An intent-based networking is truly building networks based on what is your intended outcomes, focusing on the outcomes you want to achieve with your network, not that the how and the nitty-gritty details that don't really provide the right outcomes.