Aruba scores a 6/6!

For 15 years, Convergent Technologies Group has been delivering effective IT solutions and strategies that help transform companies and move businesses forward. We give the same care and attention to every client, whether you are a small business, or a Fortune 500. CTG works with various partners to provide the perfect solutions for your business, Aruba being one of them.

In addition to being a Leader in the 2020 Gartner Report: Magic Quadrant for the Wired and Wireless LAN Access Infrastructure, Aruba is thrilled to be recognized as having the highest scores in 6 out of 6 use cases in the 2020 Gartner Critical Capabilities for Wired and Wireless LAN Access Infrastructure Report.

  

An AI-driven enterprise embraces experience as the new uptime. It’s about leveraging tools, interfaces and data to reduce reliance on manual actions, as the future becomes more focused on operations.

 

From configuring and deploying your network, to monitoring and controlling it, Aruba solutions simplify your life and bring you a step closer to realizing the benefits of a secure and automated multi-cloud enterprise to drive powerful business outcomes for years to come.

See why Gartner has scored HPE (Aruba) highest in all 6 Critical Capabilities use cases and why we believe this shows the depth of Aruba's end-to-end portfolio.

 

Read the Gartner Critical Capabilities Report

Read the Gartner Magic Quadrant Report

 

We would love to discuss Aruba with you further! 

 

HPE Discover 2018 Recap

Dalton Gormus

Last month, I attended HPE Discover 2018 in Las Vegas, NV. This was my first time in Sin City and I was transported to a whole other world. When I stepped into the Transformation Zone in the Sands Expo, I felt like I was Alice in Wonderland, completely lost but entirely intrigued. You could find everything from Lego displays to the Hack Shack. HPE Discover was a 3-day event that featured various speakers from all over the world discussing topics ranging from Blockchain to Intelligent System Tuning (IST).

The first large session I attended was, Achieving IT Agility in Mobile, IoT and Cloud with Aruba, presented by Janice Le, Aruba Networks Chief Marketer and Parth Narasimhan, Aruba, CTO. Le began the session with introducing the idea that many industries are heading into an experience economy, we are no longer buying just a good or a service, we are buying an experience. The Intelligent Edge is the experience economy we are seeing in IT, it is where smart meets digital. Aruba Networks has recently partnered with major companies like CBRE and HermanMiller Furniture to create smart and digital workplaces to make you workspace feel like home, and this is only the beginning for Aruba. CBRE is using Aruba to create smart buildings for design and IoT sensors. HermanMiller is taking their office furniture to the next level with connected desks that adjust to your height and chairs that know when you are getting up to use the restroom or if you are leaving for the evening. Narasimhan later stepped out on stage to discuss Aruba Introspect, a sensor that is used in the network to alert engineers if there is any suspicious activity going on whether it is inside or outside the company. Introspect was noted by one of our own engineers as an IT trend to keep an eye on within the next year, it is something that many companies are going to want in their tool box.

GenZ Lego Display

The General Session was the most awaited session of the week presented by Antonio Neri, HPE President and CEO. Neri addressed the digital transformation we are experiencing and the three biggest factors that HPE will be tackling during the transformation. Much like what Le was discussing with an experience economy, HPE will be focusing on transformative technology, people and economics. And to enhance this transformation the products that HPE wants to focus on are, HPE OneView, a software-defined infrastructure that eliminates the complex manual processes and increases the speed and flexibility of storage. And, Infosight, which was discussed by Aruba Networks in the previous session is another product HPE will be focusing on; currently only available for 3PAR and Nimble, but soon it will be available for all HPE products. This transformation will be vital for HPE and how companies operate, Neri said, “our purpose is to advance how we live and work”. The way we can advance and transform all of this, is to live in the intelligent edge, the “future-edge” where we interact with customers. Neri announced that HPE will be investing $4 billion into the Intelligent Edge over the next four years, only to further enhance opportunities for businesses. Following that announcement, Neri brought out Ford Motors CIO, Jeff Lemmer. The two sat on stage and discussed the strong partnership between the companies and how they will continue due to the speed and innovation HPE has shown Ford. The General Session also touched on HPE Greenlake FlexCapacity. Greenlake was featured throughout the week with displays in the Social Media forum and various sessions and booths. It is a pay-for only what you use infrastructure capacity that essentially will never run out. Pat O’Conner from Business Alliances ONX came on stage to discuss the steps to take in order to make Greenlake a part of client’s infrastructure. It is flexible, because you should never run out of the IT resources when using, it is easier for customers to engage with and it will cut down contracts exchanged by a few pages.

HPE Greenlake display

HPE made it a point to mix education and entertainment equally, which made you feel like you were not working all day. The week ended with relaxed networking and a performance by pop-rock band OneRepublic. Discover was incredibly informative, and I am grateful I was able to attend this large HPE event after only being a member of the CTG team for a few months. The biggest piece of information I took from this event was that HPE is moving in a direction that will make things simple and unified to create a better experience for partners and customers. With products like Greenlake, picking and choosing what you want rather than having it all are becoming more popular and are designed to help you save and have stronger structures.

If you are and IT professional and interested in learning more about some of these products and our services, please reach out or register for one of our events to speak with HPE and CTG experts!

Aruba ClearPass Part 2

Is your business prepared? Today’s organizations face a complex IT infrastructure, more exposed to cyberattacks than ever. The Internet of Things, an always-on mobile workforce and BYOD make visibility into your network more challenging and critical.

Identifying what’s on your network is a never-ending challenge. Not only do you need to prevent malicious users from gaining access, you have to protect against unauthorized devices and applications.

Businesses today embrace the idea of anywhere, anytime connectivity, but often ignore the need for secure network access control. Many employ a “laid back NAC” solution. Others choose the same vendor for security and network infrastructure. Both these approaches give the illusion of security, even compliance, but in reality, leave extensive security gaps.

As an Aruba ClearPass expert and partner, Convergent Technologies Group can help you reduce time spent identifying devices on your network, enforce policies, and protect your network. We will help you address questions, like:

• What’s on my network?

• How do I simplify mobile security?

• Can I limit mobile devices without limiting productivity or increasing security risks?

• How do I unify internal and external security tools?

Get started by taking this brief assessment to help you determine your network’s level of security and see how your business might be at risk. To enforce security standards throughout your enterprise, you need secure enterprise network access control (NAC). 

Aruba ClearPass is changing the NAC space, helping companies understand what’s on your network and keeping your information secure. This is an important first step in building a strategy to take control of what’s connecting to your network to keep your data secure and your business safe.

For more information about what the Aruba ClearPass solution can do to defend your network, contact Convergent Technologies Group at sales@ctgva.com or 804-353-5307.

A New Compute Experience: An Exploration of HPE’s Gen10 Servers

By Rod Knowles

Is your business finding it difficult to adapt to industry and marketplace shifts, analyzing the customer experience and/or innovating products and services rapidly?  If so, then you’re probably not thinking about, or have a plan in place for your digital transformation.  In today’s economy, digital transformation is the key to a businesses success and remaining ahead of the competition.  Through 4 key transformation areas:  Protecting the digital enterprise, Empowering the data-driven organization, Enabling workplace productivity and Transforming to a hybrid infrastructure, companies can increase profits, agility, flexibility, employee productivity and the customer experience while reducing costs and risk.  For businesses to thrive and easily adapt to their digital transformation, they need a computing environment that will deliver a Hybrid IT infrastructure providing agility, security and economic control.  HPE’s new Gen10 server line accomplishes just that.  Automation, optimized performance of workloads, secure compute lifecycle and flexible capacity are just a few of the benefits your company can gain from switching to an HPE Gen10 server.  In the next few sections, I will break down the benefits on the Gen10 line as its related to agility, security, and economic control.

Obtaining a more agile infrastructure

Manual IT operation processes can be slow and error-prone.  With the new iLO5, being introduced in all Gen10 servers, you will be able to accelerate maintenance tasks, at scale, with automated scheduling and rollback.  iLO5’s RESTful API helps automate and operate server components in all Gen10 servers from staging and updating the server BIOS, iLO, Secure Boot and TPM.  With iLO5’s intelligent provisioning, IT departments can perform initial setup tasks 22% faster than with previous versions of IP on Gen9 servers. Gen10's new Intelligent Systems Tuning can harness the power of the next generation of Intel Xeon processors and balance workloads which allows you to run more workloads on more cores, up to 28 on Intel's New Xeon Platinum processors, resulting in reduced licensing costs and more power/cooling efficiency. Couple that with HPEs new NVDIMMs to utilize the fastest persistent memory available, while realizing the real-world benefits of memory backup power, OS & Application support, reduction of database licensing costs and the fastest tier of storage on HPE Servers.

Increasing security awareness and control

Gen10 security, a better way to stay one step ahead of increasingly sophisticated attacks and protect your business utilizing the world’s most secure industry standard servers. Let’s talk about that for one quick moment, “The World’s Most Secure Industry Standard Servers”.  As recently announced at HPE Discover 2017, HPE engaged InfusionPoints to conduct an independent assessment of the security of the Gen10 Server’s hardware and platform firmware against three of HPE’s competitors. The test consisted of attacks against physical interfaces, platform firmware, and network interfaces.  The results showed that HPE Gen10 servers are a significant step ahead of their competitors and that HPE’s introduction of silicon root of trust will set new standards in providing auditable control of the integrity of platform firmware.

The new Gen10 family of servers provides a host of security features:  firmware protection, run time attack detection, behavioral risk mitigation, data protection, compliance planning and End of Life disposal.  HPE’s new firmware protection is backed by HPE’s own silicon fingerprint unique to each and every server.  With HPE’s silicon root of trust, Gen10 servers WILL NOT boot unless the firmware matches the fingerprint and is protected through the entire supply chain: manufacturing, distribution, shipping, configuration, and installation. It’s locked and HPE is the only vendor who can do this.  When the server boots, millions of lines of firmware code run and verify before the operating system even boots.  Additionally, the firmware is checked every 24 hours verifying validity and credibility of UEFI, CPLD, iLO, IE and ME and reports any malware or compromised code.  Firmware can also be checked and validated on drives, NICs and other HPE server options containing firmware. When a detection of compromised firmware is discovered, the ability to send alerts and quickly recover to a good known state can be set to occur automatically or you can choose to take the compromised server offline.  The ability to recover other server settings can also be recovered as well as the future ability to recover operating systems. 

HPE’s Gen10 servers also offer advanced machine learning that identifies any malicious behavior.  Think of it like this:  The system endlessly trains itself and learns behavioral patterns.  It then analyses and identifies changes in these patterns that may relate to suspicious activity and informs you if there is a threat.  This advanced machine learning technology utilizing Niara’s behavioral analytics protects your organization from inside attacks.  Gen10 servers are protected from inception to their demise. When your server(s) are being disposed of, its embedded data cannot be reconstructed or accessed any longer, forever, utilizing enhanced data protection and encryption.

Managing Your Time and Money Productively

In addition to the Gen10’s server line agility and security features, Economic Control helps you control costs with over-provisioning, out-of-control public cloud costs and the pressures of transforming without the appropriate budget.  Utilizing HPE Flexible Capacity will help align your costs with monthly usage and requires no upfront payments.  Pay only for what you use and scale in minutes, not months.  If you're currently a legacy Gen9 server owner, there are several options for transitioning to a Gen10 server by utilizing one of HPE’s investment models for transforming from legacy IT to a hybrid IT model.

For more information on HPE Storage and Networking, please contact Convergent Technologies Group at 888-353-5307 or via our contact us page

 Rod Knowles is a solution architect with Convergent Technologies Group.