It is not like they lack in-house talent, they have it!
Cray networking is HPC specific and isn't used in the campus or general data center markets.
And there’s huge operational benefits to Mist’s architecture even if you leave out the AI part. My best guess for why Aruba hasn’t been able to replicate at least the architecture is that they’re carrying around too much legacy they can’t break with to make this feasible.
Since they’re nearly explicitly saying “we are buying Juniper for Mist”, and at least in my opinion aren’t doing that only for further developing that portfolio towards the data center, I guess they’ve just decided to buy someone who was able to execute on that architecture shift.
Huh? They had basically 0 market share outside of SMB in the switching space.
Cisco, Arista, Juniper, Force10 (Dell).
Foundry was the bottom dollar alternative before being acquired by brocade, which Broadcom eventually ruined. And mellanox in the HPC space.
I’ve literally never run across HP switches in any enterprise datacenter, including shops that were “all in” with HP.
bc569a80a344f9c•4h ago
Press release.
It’s interesting that this requires HPE to divest from Instant On, which is their SMB brand. It’s unclear how that alone maintains a competitive landscape for enterprise customers that largely would have chosen Aruba’s more traditional offering.
That said, it’ll be interesting to see what use cases for data centers they come up with. Mist is one of very few infrastructure providers I’ve seen where AI/ML features actually improve operations. Surprisingly often in ways that I’m puzzled competitors have not been able to duplicate: something as simple as sending all access point logs through outlier detection and automated triage to proactively send RMAs for broken hardware before the customer even complains.