HPE harnesses GenAI for enhanced Aruba Networking Central platform

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has announced an upgrade to its HPE Aruba Networking Central platform. The upgrade involves leveraging generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) to improve the AIOps capabilities of the platform. The company aims to enhance user experience, increase operational efficiency and strengthen data privacy using this innovative technological approach.

What sets HPE apart in this endeavour is its use of an industry-leading data lake. HPE Aruba Networking has amassed telemetry from close to four million network-managed devices and over one billion individual customer endpoints. This massive trove of data feeds the predictive analytics and recommendations, providing not only more in-depth insights and superior analytics but also enhanced proactive capabilities.

HPE's approach to GenAI networking separates itself by utilising proprietary large language models (LLMs) designed to heighten user experience and operational efficiency. This aim focuses on search response times, accuracy, and data privacy. An integral part of the system, the new GenAI LLM functionality will be incorporated into HPE Aruba Networking Central's AI Search feature. The feature complements existing machine learning-based AI throughout HPE Networking Central to deliver better insights, analytics, and more proactive capabilities.

"Modern networking customers demand security-first, AI-powered insights into their critical infrastructure, and that's what we're delivering," commented David Hughes, Chief Product Officer at HPE Aruba Networking. According to Hughes, HPE continues its robust legacy of AI innovation with a bold move towards using multiple LLM models to harness the capabilities of GenAI.

HPE Aruba Networking maintains a strong focus on safely applying AI with a security-first approach to Personal & Customer Identifiable Information (PII/CII). This commitment is upheld by ensuring customer data security with purpose-built LLMs that remove PII/CII data and enhance search accuracy. All of this is achieved while delivering swift responses to network operations queries.

The company's training sets for its GenAI models are ten times larger than those used by other cloud-based platforms. They contain tens of thousands of HPE Aruba Networking-sourced documents in the public domain, as well as over three million questions captured from the customer base over many years of operation.

Since its inception in 2014, HPE Aruba Networking Central has delivered powerful capabilities to manage, monitor, and troubleshoot networks across wired and wireless LAN, WAN, and IoT. The new GenAI LLM-based search engine will be available in HPE's FY24 Q2 and is included with all tiers of licensing.

Will Townsend, VP & Principal Analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy, recognises the growing demand for practical AI applications that can foster meaningful business improvements. Townsend feels that AI is not new to networking and security operations, but generative AI's natural language interface is a novel development.

Verizon Business is amongst partners who use HPE Aruba Networking Central, a testament to the technology's value in improving network and application performance, enabling more agile and predictable outcomes without overstretching internal IT resources.