Hewlett Packard Enterprise leverages GenAI to enhance AIOps capabilities

Hewlett Packard Enterprise is expanding its AIOps network management capabilities by integrating multiple generative AI (GenAI) Large Language Models (LLMs) within HPE Aruba Networking Central, HPE’s cloud-native network management solution, hosted on the HPE GreenLake Cloud Platform. In related news, HPE also announced Verizon Business is expanding its managed services portfolio to include HPE Aruba Networking Central.

Unlike other GenAI networking approaches that simply send API calls to public LLMs, HPE Aruba Networking Central’s new self-contained set of LLM models was designed with innovative pre-processing and guardrails to improve user experience and operational efficiency, with a focus on search response times, accuracy, and data privacy. With one of the largest data lakes in the industry, HPE Aruba Networking has collected telemetry from nearly four million network-managed devices and more than one billion unique customer endpoints, which power HPE Aruba Networking Central’s machine learning models for predictive analytics and recommendations. The new GenAI LLM functionality will be incorporated into HPE Aruba Networking Central’s AI Search feature, complementing existing machine learning (ML)-based AI throughout HPE Networking Central to provide deeper insights, better analytics, and more proactive capabilities.

“Modern networking customers demand security-first, AI-powered insights into their critical infrastructure, and that’s what we’re delivering,” said David Hughes, chief product officer, HPE Aruba Networking. “HPE continues its strong history of AI innovation with this bold move and HPE Aruba Networking Central’s new approach of deploying multiple LLM models to embrace the capabilities of GenAI.”

HPE Aruba Networking continues its commitment to leveraging AI safely with a security-first approach to Personal & Customer Identifiable Information (PII/CII), as the LLM’s are “sandboxed” within HPE Aruba Networking Central, running on the HPE GreenLake Cloud Platform. HPE Aruba Networking Central also ensures customer data security with proprietary, purpose-built LLMs which remove PII/CII data and improve search accuracy, all while delivering sub-second response to network operations questions.

As part of its expanded capabilities, HPE Aruba Networking Central’s training sets for the GenAI models are up to ten times larger than other cloud-based platforms and include tens of thousands of HPE Aruba Networking-sourced documents in the public domain, as well as more than three million questions that have been captured from the customer base over many years of operations.

Since its introduction in 2014, HPE Aruba Networking Central has delivered powerful capabilities to configure, manage, monitor and troubleshoot networks across wired and wireless LAN, WAN and IoT, integrating functions throughout the lifecycle of network operations. HPE Aruba Networking Central is a SaaS offering that is primarily sold as an annual subscription with a two-tier licensing model (Foundation and Advanced). The new GenAI LLM-based search engine will be available in HPE’s FY24 Q2 and is included with all tiers of licensing. In addition to being a standalone SaaS offering, HPE Aruba Networking Central is also included as part of an HPE GreenLake for Networking (NaaS) subscription and is available through the HPE GreenLake platform.

“Today, customers are searching for practical AI applications that can make meaningful improvements to their business,” said Will Townsend, VP & Principal Analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy. “When it comes to effective network management, data and models matter. AI is not new to networking and security operations, but generative AI is given its natural language interface. The challenge lies in tightly aligning queries with AI algorithms to deliver relevant and meaningful business outcomes. A set of purpose-built LLMs delivered in a self-contained sandbox delivers the best of both privacy and performance. With this HPE Aruba Networking Central announcement, HPE is launching compelling generative AI functionality that doesn't sacrifice performance for the sake of hardened security.”

Partners like Verizon Business leverage HPE Aruba Networking Central, or Verizon Managed SD Branch to help organizations improve their network and application performance, supporting more agile and predictable outcomes without burdening in-house IT resources.