Business white paper

HPE and Arista Networking Software-defined, cloud-first network architecture Business white paper

Table of contents

3 What you need today – and tomorrow – from your data center infrastructure 3 The transformation journey to cloud-first network architecture 3 Making the move from traditional IT to Hybrid IT

4 HPE and Arista: what this strategic partnership brings to you 5 Data Center Virtualization 5 IP storage 5 High-performance computing 5 Mission Critical Applications (SAP) 6 Media and Entertainment 6 Data center security

6 Accelerate your network infrastructure transformation with consulting services 7 Reducing risk at every step of your transformation journey Business white paper Page 3

What you need today – and tomorrow – from your data center infrastructure

Your business is not standing still, which is why you are constantly demanding more from your data center infrastructure.

You need to extend a continuous delivery model across your infrastructure. You require more scale from your infrastructure. You want to give developers more control and the ability to automate more. And you want to provision faster—much faster.

This means that you need to have the right infrastructure optimized for applications, old and new. What we’re talking about here is Hybrid IT that seamlessly combines public cloud, private cloud, and traditional IT. So you can maximize the performance, cost, and agility of the services you deliver—while accelerating the delivery of apps and services to your enterprise.

The transformation journey to cloud-first network architecture

Along with the rest of your data center, networking requirements are evolving rapidly.

Over the last decade, the industry has seen broad adoption of compute infrastructure based on commodity x86 hardware. In recent years, the power and performance offered by these servers has increased dramatically, to the point where it is no longer unusual to see hosts capable of generating above 10Gbs of traffic.

With the overall network traffic growing in line with server performance and density, the demand on the network for additional capacity has never been greater.

At the same time, today’s legacy networks are often holding you back from making this transition.

Making the move from traditional IT to Hybrid IT The modern data center market is being transformed with more efficient architectures and technologies, including compute, storage, and networking coming together as Hybrid IT.

Your organization requires network architectures that are open and programmable—and that are completely aligned and integrated into data center technology stacks, including compute, storage and cloud. This helps you to converge, standardize, and virtualize your network infrastructure, which in turn works to lower costs and accelerate service delivery.

We see better options through a software-defined infrastructure that provides fast, agile, simple, and efficient service delivery.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise—in partnership with Arista Networks—offers a cloud-first data center architecture to help you address transformation challenges.

Software-defined infrastructure

Traditional IT Hybrid infrastructure Compute Storage Networking Business white paper Page 4

HPE and Arista: what this strategic partnership brings to you

HPE offers a range of data center networking solutions designed to address the growth of big data and storage, the expansion of web and cloud data centers, and the expansion of dense virtualized multi-tenancy environments across a set of increasingly segmented customer type and use case.

While HPE continues to offer both our FlexFabric and Altoline product lines to address both traditional and open networking customer requirements, HPE and Arista is our preferred solution for building high-performance, software-defined cloud networks.

Ours is not a new relationship. It is a logical progression that has existed for several years, where we have been jointly delivering combined HPE and Arista Networks solutions.

HPE and Arista share a common vision centered on delivering secure Hybrid IT solutions and experiences built on industry-leading software-defined infrastructure. Our combined objective is to help you operate your workloads with the speed and agility you need to grow your business.

Today, the HPE and Arista partnership provides you with best-of-breed networking solutions that help you move beyond legacy solutions while complementing HPE compute, storage, and cloud offerings.

“IDC has closely monitored the relationship between HPE and Arista, and we believe it is evolving into a substantial partnership with significant implications for the vendors directly involved and for the datacenter networking market in general.” –  HPE-Arista Partnership Takes Aim at Cloud-Centric IT Infrastructure Market IDC Doc#US42414517 by Brad Casemore and Rohit Mehra Business white paper Page 5

The HPE and Arista portfolio: powering mission-critical, software-defined data center workloads

Arista networking products are being aggressively integrated into our HPE data center infrastructure solution offerings.

Our joint focus is on addressing your most pressing data center and cloud networking use cases, including highly virtualized data centers, IP storage, high-performance computing, and data center security, to name a few. These use cases provide the right lens for viewing our portfolio offerings.

Data Center Virtualization Virtualization places unprecedented demands on the data center, accelerating the evolution of new application architectures and is having profound effects on the network.

HPE and Arista offer a comprehensive portfolio of solutions and services that span HPE ProLiant ML/DL300, DL500 servers, Apollo 2000 servers, and VMware® vSphere, plus Arista 7050X and 7250QX 10/40GbE wire speed switches that are purpose built to address the growth of web, cloud, and dense virtualized multi-tenancy environments.

IP storage The cost of deploying and maintaining traditional storage networks is growing exponentially. New requirements for compliance and new applications such as analytics drive ever-increasing volumes of unstructured data collection.

HPE and Arista bring together best-of-breed networking that enables software-defined storage architectures to support emerging software-defined cloud network and IP Storage based use cases. These HPE solutions span HPE StoreVirtual and HPE 3PAR StoreServ flash storage offerings, as well as HPE ProLiant, Blade, and Apollo servers—with Arista 7280E 100GbE deep‑buffer switches optimized for spline/leaf storage networks.

High-performance computing High-performance computing (HPC) is continually increasing in size, density, power requirements, storage, and performance. As these systems grow, the network becomes more critical to allowing full utilization of compute resources. Many HPC environments tend to neglect managing the network.

HPE and Arista are collaborating on HPC architectural best practices that take advantage of software-defined networks to scale large cluster growth to lower costs and drive high compute efficiencies. Our HPE HPC product portfolio spans Apollo servers and SGI HPC systems, along with Arista 7500E in the core and 7150 and 7050X Series switches at the edge to support 10/40/100GbE networks.

Mission Critical Applications (SAP) With more than 45,000 customers, SAP® is the most significant provider of business processing software for the enterprise. More than 80% of enterprises run SAP on conventional databases, such as Oracle, DB2, and SQL Server on x86 or UNIX® servers.

When SAP needed to deploy and scale its own peta-scale HANA infrastructure, it chose Arista Networks 10/40/100GbE switches to meet its high-density, non-blocking, and deep‑buffering application and network requirements.

HPE and Arista high-performance, ultra-low latency solutions can scale from a few racks to some of the largest SAP and Hadoop deployments of thousands of devices. Multi-Chassis LAG (MLAG) offers true active/active uplink connectivity from each rack, allowing the full bisectional bandwidth of the network to be utilized in a flat layer-two network for smaller deployments. Business white paper Page 6

Media and Entertainment HPE and Arista helps Media and Entertainment (M&E) companies build a high-performance infrastructure that meets today’s demands—while also providing the right functionality and performance for the evolution into next-gen media workflows.

HPE and Arista 7500E support large-scale digital rendering farms with an ability to deploy a two‑tier network architecture supporting scale-out 40/100GbE server racks and VOQ. Arista also offers deep buffers for uncongested low-latency performance between compute and storage nodes for massive digital content creation and storage consolidation.

Data center security Since the network is the primary medium that bridges physical, virtual, and cloud environments, network traffic is becoming increasingly recognized for its role in providing an attack surface for malware and threats to enter the enterprise. Many security vendors are increasing their capabilities in analyzing network traffic for threats, anomalies, and lateral movement of malware. However, no matter how sophisticated these security solutions become, they all rely on accurate monitoring of the network traffic.

HPE and Arista switches with software-driven cloud networking provide IT and security operations teams with software-driven visibility and control. This encompasses automation, services, and comprehensive visibility needed to: • Deliver an agile, cost-efficient cloud infrastructure for any workload on demand • Inspect all east-west traffic for profiled attack patterns with redirect analysis • Maintain next-generation firewall security rules for all at-risk traffic at any scale, in line, all the time Arista CloudVision provides a seamless and consolidated view of the entire cloud infrastructure and provides the foundation for automating integration of next-generation firewalls, security monitoring tools, and application delivery controllers.

Accelerate your network infrastructure transformation with consulting services

Getting started on your transformation journey can be quite daunting. Like many organizations, you may benefit from having a trusted advisor to help you navigate through the complexity.

HPE and Arista are uniquely positioned to help your organization transition to Hybrid IT environments and software-defined cloud networks. Business white paper Page 7

Reducing risk at every step of your transformation journey

The journey to Hybrid IT encompasses many elements. HPE Pointnext consulting offers a very mature methodology designed to guide you through every step of the transformation.

Regardless of your starting point, HPE Pointnext consulting can help you develop and execute the transformation through a series of pragmatic steps. We apply our HPE Trusted Network Transformation methodology to mitigate the risks of change. And we carry out this approach with HPE Hybrid IT Networking Services that enable you to: • Integrate anything into anything—with our multivendor experience and capabilities, you have the flexibility to integrate the platforms and software technologies that are appropriate for your business and IT objectives. • Mitigate risks with pragmatic steps—while your end-state vision may be miles away from your current state, we advocate taking pragmatic, attainable steps to making network infrastructure changes so you can mitigate risks. The steps are tailored to your technology, people, processes, and ongoing operations. We allow your network to deliver innovation and keep your business running. • Apply a proven, vetted methodology—to guide you through each of these steps in highly risk-mitigated way, we use our HPE Trusted Network Transformation approach. Our detailed, mapped out methodology is built on the experience gained from own network transformation and from helping customers across numerous industries worldwide.

HPE Trusted Network Transformation methodology Aligning people, and technology to enable the business

Transformation Assessment & Strategy & Validated Validated integration Support & workshop analysis architecture design & implementation evolve

Management Security Program management Financial of change & assurance & sponsorship options

Our portfolio also includes: • Global Arista capabilities—the full lifecycle of Pointnext consulting services is available globally as we work with you to assess, design, integrate, and optimize your data center networking needs. • Channel partner collaboration—with our segmented strategy designed to avoid channel conflict while enabling value and volume, our consulting focuses primarily on enterprise accounts. We’re at our best when tackling the challenges of customer and solution complexity. Our Trusted Network Transformation partner approach determines the best fit for HPE with channel partner strengths and capabilities. Business white paper

The big picture: greater differentiation and value with HPE and Arista

With HPE and Arista, we bring you the world’s best-selling computer partnered with the industry’s faster growing data center networking vendor.

The HPE and Arista portfolios brings architectural advantages and unprecedented scalability around a common vision to deliver secure Hybrid IT built on industry-leading software-defined infrastructure helping customers to operate their workloads with speed and agility to grow their business.

HPE Pointnext consulting HPE Flexible Capacity Azure public cloud HPE Financial Services integration services - advise, design and brings pay-as-you go economics and incorporated into Flexible Capacity with o ers range of tailored IT transform, proven methodology flexibility to on-premises IT one invoice and portal for usage investment solutions

HPE global footprint HPE Converged Architecture CA 700 w/ Arista pre-sales systems engineers in AMS, VMware Helion CloudSystem 9 EMEA, APJ - single trusted partner

HPE OneView World’s-best selling compute partnered with the HPE and Arista Ref Designs integration with Arista EOS automates industry’s fastest growing data center network vendor HPC, Big Data. SAP, Storage, and simplifies network provisioning Virtualization

HPE Trusted Network Transformation and Datacenter Care Operational Support Services

HPE ProLiantHPE BladeSystemHPE SynergyHPE Apollo HPE Storage

Learn more at HPE and Arista Network Solutions HPE Trusted Network Transformation

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© Copyright 2017 Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. The only warranties for Hewlett Packard Enterprise products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. Hewlett Packard Enterprise shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein. Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle and/or its affiliates. SAP is the trademark or registered trademark of SAP SE in Germany and in several other countries. UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group. VMware is a registered trademark or trademark of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. a00006550ENW, May 2017