Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has launched a comprehensive suite of hardware and software products aimed at helping enterprises build and manage large-scale AI infrastructures from the data center to the edge. The announcements came at the company's Discover event in Las Vegas, where HPE emphasized the critical role of networking in enabling successful AI and agentic AI deployments.
“AI requires a solid architectural foundation, and the success of agentic AI in the enterprise depends on a modern networking foundation built for autonomous workflows, where network performance, reliability, and intelligence determine the effectiveness of the entire AI architecture,” said Rami Rahim, executive vice president and general manager of networking at HPE. He highlighted that the new offerings are designed to let enterprises deploy agentic AI with greater control, confidence, security, and operational simplicity.
New QFX5140 Switch for AI Inferencing
Central to the hardware announcements is the HPE Juniper Networking QFX5140 switch, a 1RU fixed-configuration data center switch targeting the booming demand for AI inferencing and edge AI workloads. With a throughput of 16 Tbps, the QFX5140 supports flexible port configurations including 24x 400G QSFP112, 8x 800G OSFP800, and 2x SFP28 ports. It also includes support for RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCEv2), along with congestion management features such as Priority Flow Control and Explicit Congestion Notification, all designed to optimize GPU-to-GPU communications.
The QFX5140 fills the mid-tier of HPE's Juniper QFX family, sitting between the high-end 102T QFX5240/QFX5250 and the entry-level 100GbE QFX 5100. This expansion gives customers more options for building scalable AI fabrics, spine-leaf architectures, and border leaf deployments.
In addition, HPE announced the QFX5252 module designed for its 72-GPU-per-rack AMD Helios turnkey package. This module targets AI training and high-volume inferencing, combining CPUs, GPUs, and open Ethernet networking into a unified high-end AI platform. The QFX family is also now integrated into HPE's Data Center Director management platform, offering a centralized view of network components for improved visibility and faster troubleshooting.
Deeper Mist AI Integration Across Portfolio
Continuing its integration strategy following the Juniper acquisition, HPE announced plans to integrate Juniper's natural language Mist AI into HPE Aruba Central and vice versa. This integration is powered by the core AIOps engine, Marvis, which collects telemetry and user state data from Juniper routers, switches, access points, firewalls, and applications to detect and resolve enterprise networking problems.
A key enhancement is the expansion of Marvis Actions, which uses AI to identify and prioritize network problem remediation. HPE said Marvis Actions will be extended to Aruba Central by the end of the year, bringing proactive wired port remediation and other autonomous operations across wired, wireless, and SD-WAN environments. HPE also announced that the Aruba CX switching portfolio will be integrated with Mist, giving CX customers AI-native visibility, zero-touch provisioning, wired assurance for Layer 2 access, and Marvis AI-driven support.
Mist's data center capabilities have also been expanded to include predictive analytics for proactive maintenance. For example, Mist can now use AI/ML to predict potential optics failures before they cause network outages. Additionally, a new advanced reasoning AI agent—part of the agentic AI push—can continuously and autonomously reason across diverse data streams, including millions of TAC cases and contextual graph data from HPE Networking Data Center Director, to deliver precise root cause analysis inside the data center. “So the problems that once took hours if not days to diagnose can now be resolved literally in minutes or even proactively before anybody understands that there is an issue,” Rami said.
Industry analysts see this as a strong move. “The most important takeaway is that there’s real momentum behind HPE’s acquisition strategy to leverage the core of the Mist platform by expanding Marvis as the AI engine across the portfolio,” said Mike Leibovitz, senior director analyst at Gartner. “They are continuing to innovate while simultaneously integrating that model into Aruba networking, into the data center, and out the branch.” He added that “Agentic NetOps is the most exciting area of innovation in enterprise networking in more than 20 years,” positioning HPE well against competitors like Cisco and Arista.
Unified SASE Orchestrator
To simplify WAN access to data center resources, HPE unveiled a new SASE Orchestrator package that ties together its SD-WAN and SSE (Security Service Edge) with cloud security and a unified policy engine using AI. The orchestrator enables customers to set security policies once and deploy them across many sites, handling branch, remote user, and cloud connectivity from a single pane of glass. “The Orchestrator promises simpler operations with AI operations, faster zero-trust adoption, and a better user experience through intelligent traffic steering and application awareness,” Rami explained.
Nvidia Partnership Enhancements
HPE also tightened its integration with core partner Nvidia through updates to the HPE Private Cloud AI, a turnkey AI factory co-engineered with Nvidia. The package now supports Nvidia’s Agent Toolkit, including Nemotron open models, NemoClaw, and OpenShell secure runtime, to provide an agent operating system that reasons, monitors agent behavior, enforces policies, and reduces deployment risk. Additionally, HPE is bringing Nvidia Confidential Computing to the HPE AI Factory through HPE Services, protecting models and private data during execution for on-premises or sovereign deployments.
Zerto and Morpheus Updates
New releases of HPE Zerto Software help customers identify rogue agent actions and rewind to a clean state using data protection. The Private Cloud AI package also now supports secure local agent registration, allowing customers to approve AI models, skills, and tools while adhering to centralized governance and security policies.
HPE Morpheus, the cloud management platform often positioned as an alternative to Broadcom’s VMware, received a significant pricing offer: customers who own or buy HPE’s VM Essentials package for a year will not pay license fees for the first year. This includes free Zerto migration licenses to ease the transition. “We are announcing that as a customer goes through this transformation with HPE Morpheus VM Essentials, you don’t pay for the first year of licenses,” said HPE CTO Fidelma Russo. Zero-interest financing for HPE cloud ops software over three years further supports customer migration, aiming to accelerate adoption and ease transitions from legacy platforms.
Overall, HPE’s barrage of announcements underscores its commitment to building a comprehensive AI-native networking and management ecosystem, integrating hardware, software, and partnerships to meet the demands of modern AI workloads from the data center to the edge.
Source:Network World News