Aruba Fabric Composer Simplifies and Accelerates Networking
Building an enterprise data infrastructure? You likely know how complex it can be. It involves everything from extensive planning to integrating old systems and managing all sorts of disparate components. You may also have legacy operations and processes in place. These can make it a maze to figure out how to integrate a new IT cloud infrastructure. And if you aren’t able to, your data management can see all sorts of bottlenecks, affecting the efficiency of your applications.
One of the biggest challenges is the network fabric—the mortar between the bricks of your infrastructure, storage, and application resources. If there’s a bottleneck in that fabric, your organization will struggle.
The Aruba Fabric Composer simplifies your network provisioning and management to solve that challenge. It can orchestrate your switches into a single fabric while automating your configuration and even handling lifecycle events. The result is a unified network and security management tool that keeps your enterprise humming. But let’s zoom in on how it streamlines your fabric management across multiple data center locations.
How Aruba Fabric Composer Helps
Aruba Fabric Composer integrates a user-friendly interface that offers real-time visualization of the network environment, including host networking, switch ports, and VMs. It doesn’t necessarily force any particular configuration on your administrators. However you can use APIs and third-party automation to enhance operations in any way you choose.
The composer works best for Aruba OSCX switches and HPE data centers, but it does support more than that, including non-HPE environments like Nutanix and VMware. You can also integrate with tools like the HPE iLO Amplifier pack to simplify your server management. Or, if you want automated responses for lifecycle events, use its application awareness to handle things like VM configuration changes.
That’s a long way of saying the Fabric Composer will streamline your fabric operations. The net result: your administrators will have it much easier, obtaining the eagle-eye view they always wanted without an overly complicated setup. For example, the Host View within the composer lets administrators check end-to-end connectivity between VMs, port groups, vSwitches, and more. Consider it a simple way to handle network fabric in the modern environment.
Fabric Composer Features to Check Out
Let’s dive into the specific features. How does Aruba Fabric Composer simplify what you need?
- Global network control: The fabric composer combines centralized network management with decentralized control. Think of it as creating a symphony between network states across the entire Aruba CX switching fabric. Aruba Fabric Composer will update topology information to switches and implement the configurations as appropriately as possible.
- Workload optimizing: The fabric composer will optimize your data paths. These paths, after all, have to meet the demands of your application workloads to create stable, predictable network performance. The Fabric Composer can align network resources with your network’s specific workload requirements.
- Workload visibility: What’s going on in your systems? In the compute, storage, and network resources? Aruba Fabric Composer will gather the information from each system so you have a comprehensive view of all of it. Ultimately, this will help you understand how the virtual demands on your system impact the physical network itself.
- Unified Policy: Let Aruba Fabric Composer handle your segmentation, security, and firewall policies. These can be difficult to manage manually, and if you don’t get it right, it can create all sorts of bottlenecks. But the Fabric Composer can step in as the network/security engine for the Aruba CX 10000 Series Switch with Pensando. The result? Your network configurations and firewall policy definitions will be a relative breeze.
- Workflow automation: Aruba Fabric Composer uses events to trigger automation, which will integrate with your existing data center infrastructure systems. It features integration packs to automate your workflows. You can even use triggers from third-party systems to react in real time without manual intervention on your end.
The Benefits of the Aruba Fabric Composer
The can help streamline your day-to-day operations, your troubleshooting, and the switches you use can all come together as a single networking fabric. Its workflow automation and GUI will automate the complexity of your modern data center and simplify tasks for administrators.
But that’s not all. Administrators will also love the increased visibility and control they get when the Fabric Composer is set up. Its end-to-end network visibility will simplify your troubleshooting of connectivity issues. Is something going wrong? With more visibility, you’ll be able to diagnose the problem much more quickly, which leads to minimal downtime.
Thanks to the unified results you get after using the composer, you’ll also find it easier to centrally define policy elements and distribute them to each rack. Think of it as a micro-segmentation of workloads. This “Unified policy integration” means administrators can even set up stateless ACLs enforced by a distributed services firewall. And you can control it from a central dashboard with ease.
Your data can sometimes feel like a brick-and-mortar system—and if you don’t handle the mortar right, the bricks fall apart. That’s what the Aruba Fabric Composer brings to modern data centers: a central adhesive that makes everything work more harmoniously together. Ultimately, it’s about enhancing visibility, improving the connections at your data center, and setting up automation that makes your systems run much more smoothly.
Reach out to comport to discuss your Aruba Networking needs.
