Arista highlights its consolidation of network management tools within CloudVision, while HPE extends Aruba Central to include Cisco and other third-party network devices.
The longtime trend among major networking vendors is to consolidate data center and wired and wireless LAN management in a single cloud-based console. Arista Networks and HPE recently took significant steps in unifying their network management and monitoring tools.
This week, Arista highlighted its consolidation efforts within CloudVision. At the same time, HPE extended its Aruba Central platform to include third-party network devices, including those from Cisco, Juniper Networks and Palo Alto Networks.
Arista, Cisco, Extreme Networks, HPE and Juniper are at different stages of providing a single cloud-based product that can change a security policy or network configuration and push it out to all network domains, analysts said. The goal is to do as much as possible within a network platform as opposed to having many separate tools for executing tasks across devices.
HPE has integrated Central with OpsRamp, the IT operations management platform it acquired last year. Combining the two provides Central customers with visibility into the state of third-party network devices.
The addition of OpsRamp marks the first time Central can offer an extensive view of devices from other vendors, said Alan Ni, a senior director of marketing at HPE's Aruba networking business. Supported devices include switches, routers, access points, firewalls and load balancers.
OpsRamp offers problem detection, root cause analysis and possible resolutions of issues across data center infrastructure; campus networks; and hybrid, multi-cloud and edge environments. HPE's data lake is where OpsRamp gets the telemetry for its analytics.
HPE is adding OpsRamp's core features to Central at no additional cost, Ni said. The vendor plans to make them available next month.
Multi-vendor IT operations management is not new to HPE. The company had a suite of network and systems management software called OpenView. In 2017, HPE sold it with the rest of its enterprise software business to Micro Focus, which OpenText acquired for $5.8 billion last year.
Now that HPE has returned to multi-vendor management, the question is whether it's committed to investing in keeping OpsRamp a valuable tool for managing competitors' products, said Jim Frey, an analyst at TechTarget's Enterprise Strategy Group. Organizations are skeptical that vendors will keep up with the latest features in a competitor's products.
"It's a great step forward [to acquire OpsRamp]," Frey said. "But they're going to have to prove that they can continue to deliver those multi-vendor capabilities."
Arista's moves to all-in-one network management
Arista doesn't have an OpsRamp-like product. However, CloudVision can provide monitoring of other vendors' hardware and software.
"You can get a nice end-to-end view of your networking estate," said Shamus McGillicuddy, an analyst at Enterprise Management Associates.
It's a great step forward. But [HP is] going to have to prove that they can continue to deliver those multi-vendor capabilities.
Jim FreyAnalyst, Enterprise Strategy Group
Arista highlighted recent feature upgrades to CloudVision for Campus, CV Pathfinder for the WAN, CV Universal Network Observability for the data center and multi-domain segmentation services for zero-trust network security. Arista delivers all the services via its single CloudVision platform.
"They're highlighting their ability to pull together management of all the different domains," McGillicuddy said. "Over the last [six] years, Arista has been expanding from being a data center networking specialist to offering switching, Wi-FI and LAN routing."
All the major networking vendors have their strengths and weaknesses in managing across network domains, Frey said. Arista's strengths remain in its origins as a data center company.
Extreme and HPE do not have a product portfolio for the data center as extensive as Arista, Cisco and Juniper. However, Cisco lags the others in creating a single cloud-based management console.
"Cisco hasn't done a good job of connecting all of the dots into a one-platform strategy," Frey said.
Last year, Cisco unveiled plans to develop a cloud-based software console named Networking Cloud to access all its on-premises and cloud-based network management tools. The console will also provide predictive analytics and visibility across network domains.
However, Cisco is likely a year or two away from delivering on the promises of Networking Cloud, analysts said.
Antone Gonsalves is an editor at large for TechTarget Editorial, reporting on industry trends critical to enterprise tech buyers. He has worked in tech journalism for 25 years and is based in San Francisco. Have a news tip? Please drop him an email.
