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HPE Extends Software-Defined Partnership with Arista Networks
Hewlett Packard Enterprise today announced it's extending its 15-month partnership with software-defined networking (SDN) specialist Arista Networks to allow customers to buy that company's switching products directly from HPE.
In June of last year, the companies inked an agreement to develop the HP Converged Architecture with Arista, described as "an open, modular design, built on a verified reference architecture that enables customers to quickly deploy, setup and manage the system."
Today, at the company's Global Partner Conference in Boston, HPE announced that partnership will be advanced even further with the addition of Arista switching products to its FlexFabric and Altoline product lines. FlexFabric is described as an "automated, programmable datacenter fabric architecture," while Altoline is a family of switching products.
HPE said its ability to sell Arista switching products to customers and partners "will advance our strategy to provide secure Hybrid IT solutions built on the industry's leading software-defined datacenter infrastructure portfolio."
Beyond providing Arista products in its portfolio, HPE said Arista will now be its preferred networking partner in datacenter networking, providing a foundation for HPE's line of software-defined infrastructure products and services.
"HPE and Arista share a common vision around the need to deliver secure Hybrid IT solutions and experiences built on industry-leading software-defined infrastructure -- helping customers to operate their workloads with speed and agility to grow their business," HPE said. "This partnership will provide our customers with best of breed networking solutions that are superior to legacy networking solutions and that are complementary to our HPE Data Center Infrastructure Group (DCIG) solutions including HPE compute, storage, virtualization and cloud offerings."
The partnership is but the latest of many software-defined initiatives HPE has undertaken, which the company framed in the context of the new-age network virtualization movement maturing and moving from its roots among big carriers and providers to regular enterprise use.
"Software-defined networking continues to gain market traction as an innovative architectural model capable of enabling automated provisioning, network virtualization and network programmability for datacenters at cloud-providers and enterprise networks," HPE said. "Although SDN initially found favor in hyper-scale data centers and at large-scale cloud service providers, it is also winning adoption in a growing number of enterprise datacenters across a broad range of vertical markets."
HPE will begin selling Arista equipment on Nov. 7.
About the Author
David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.