December 04, 2019 By BlueAlly
Aruba Central got its start back way in 2013, when we introduced a brand-new cloud-based management service for Aruba Instant access points. Those were the days when people were excited about the blazing 300Mbps speeds of 802.11n and Aruba’s solution to the “sticky client” problem was a technology breakthrough. The goal of Aruba Central was to allow network administrators to manage the Wi-Fi in their remote offices without needing an on-site technical expertise.
Back then, Central was a simple, cloud-based management platform. Aruba has significantly upped the ante for cloud-based network management by integrating analytics and assurance, SD-Branch and SD-WAN, and device security into the cloud platform. And, we’ve redesigned Central to greatly increase scale and geographic reach.
Central Expands Across APAC
Using local instances of the cloud-based Central improves performance and reduces latency, which is especially important given the great distances across APAC. Data sovereignty is important for many customers, as they need to comply with different countries’ laws governing the control and storage of sensitive data.
With the introduction of release 2.5, Central now operates in four regions in APAC. We launched Central in Sydney, Tokyo and China, in addition to the original instance in Mumbai. With Sydney more than 10,000 kilometers from Mumbai, I am particularly thrilled about the speedy response time for our customers in Australia.
In total, Aruba runs 20 production clusters of Central across APAC, the US and Canada, and Europe. Aruba also runs 30 R&D clusters of Central. Central has scaled to manage more than 750,000 devices for customers and there’s plenty of headroom for growth.
Central Continues to Evolve
Aruba Central reduces siloed network operations by providing one place for all monitoring and management functions and presenting network-wide AI-based insights, so IT can quickly obtain the information needed to deliver great network experiences at the edge.
Integration of Aruba’s Analytics and Assurance capabilities into Central allows IT managers to resolve infrastructure problems before they impact the user experience. And IT can proactively optimize their infrastructure for a better user experience.
With integrated SD-Branch and SD-WAN management capabilities, IT can centrally monitor and control business-intent policies at branch locations and reduce the need for skilled IT professionals onsite. IT staff can use the SD-WAN Orchestrator Now capability in Central to provision gateway connectivity at scale and simplify WAN management.
Aruba ClearPass Device Insight is also integrated into Central, enabling IT to automatically discover and fingerprint IoT devices.
A Cloud Platform Designed for Maximum Agility
To create a scalable, global platform to that can support the specific requirements of different regions, we developed the latest version of Central as a cloud-native application. Central runs on AWS, and can be deployed on other cloud platforms.
With Amazon as our partner and Central’s composable cloud architecture, we can scale Central quickly, easily and efficiently pretty much anywhere in the world. With Central’s modern architecture, our DevOps team can quickly add new and different capabilities to meet customers’ specific needs, such Device Insight or PCI compliance, in a particular region. We can turn up an entirely new instance in a new geography in a matter of hours. And we can easily scale Central both up and down to meet ever-changing customer needs.