Hewlett-Packard Enterprise recently unveiled significant enhancements to its self-driving network architecture. Juniper Networks can be credited for much of the groundwork, having put an early stake in the ground well before its acquisition by HPE.
Modern AI applications and agentic frameworks have enormous potential in unlocking digital transformation and deploying automation at scale. Commensurately bringing autonomy to not only the underlying network architecture but also network operations has the capability to strengthen assurance and security posture.
Defining A Self-Driving Network Architecture
HPE positions itself as the industry’s first and exclusive provider of fully autonomous, agentic AIOps enterprise networking. It is a bold statement, one that is technically accurate given Nokia’s autonomous networks platform was first deployed within public and private mobile networks.
Broadly speaking, HPE’s strategy defines three critical considerations in moving from a feature set mentality to an all-encompassing, self-driving network architecture. First, an emphasis on experience-first intelligence leverages optimal levels of real-time and synthetic data, autonomous agents, and mesh orchestration to deliver a modern and complete stack. Second, the provision of AI-native infrastructure that is open, cloud native, and microservices code-based provides the necessary scale for deployment flexibility. Third, integral security that incorporates universal zero-trust, least-privileged access and offers SASE and hybrid mesh firewall capabilities provides an unparalleled combination of enterprise-grade security.
HPE’s self-driving network architecture is well laid out, and it builds upon a decade of development first started by Juniper that runs across the Mist and Aruba portfolios today as the company maintains a dual branding strategy for its networking portfolio.
New Autonomous Actions And AIOps Capabilities
Several new autonomous actions are also worth highlighting within the May 6 announcement, including Dynamic Frequency Selection, Dynamic Capacity Optimization, and automated VLAN remediation. From an AIOps perspective, there are new client roaming insights and user experience latency metrics, coupled with OpenRoaming with Mist Assurance and HPE Aruba network access control, simplified inline micro segmentation, and NAC sandboxing features.
These are powerful network assurance and security capabilities that move beyond AI-assisted operations to eliminate manual intervention and the resulting errors that often cause network downtime and poor application experiences.
Final Thoughts
Intent-based networking had its hype cycle moment over ten years ago, but automation schemes at that time were bespoke and limited in terms of scalability. Agentic AI has changed all of that in an extremely brief period of time. HPE has taken advantage of the opportunity to develop an agentic framework that observes, reasons, decides, acts, validates, and learns. Through it, new autonomous actions and AIOps capabilities, the company has built an architecture that comprehends the need to move unprecedented and unpredictable amounts of data for training and inference, making HPE’s self-driving network a reality.
