Brocade, Aruba Ally To Deliver Open-Standards Based Unified Campus Network

Brocade and Aruba Networks Inc. have announced a strategic relationship to deliver an pen-standards based unified campus network to support secure mobility, the proliferation of mobile devices within campus environments, Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) initiatives and emerging technologies, such as Software-Defined Networking (SDN). The resulting integrated wired and wireless solution provides a best-of-breed approach that enables customers to eliminate vendor lock-in and reduce total cost of ownership by nearly half as compared to equivalent offerings.

Through this relationship, Brocade and Aruba will jointly develop and bring to market solutions across multiple industries, including U.S. federal government. With integrated solutions already deployed worldwide, Brocade and Aruba will collaborate on R&D to bring tighter integration for a simplified and agile wired and wireless campus network.

“Campus networks are buckling under the proliferation of today’s mobile initiatives, which makes this space ripe for disruption and ready for the application of intelligent solutions,” said Lloyd Carney, Chief Executive Officer, Brocade. “We view the campus network as the on-ramp to the virtualised datacentre and look forward to collaborating with Aruba to apply our cloud and SDN technologies to create a more unified and simplified solution.”

The shift to enterprise mobility breaks legacy three-tier network architectures with an overlay wireless tier. As a result, IT departments are struggling to provide differentiated experiences and security for an ever increasingly mobile user community and its growing number of devices and applications. To address these customer pain points, Brocade and Aruba are pairing the scalable and simplified network operation of Brocade HyperEdge architecture with the rich context of user, device, application and location information inherent in the Aruba Mobile Virtual Enterprise (MOVE) architecture to deliver secure mobile user experiences for customers. The result is a simplified, mobility-centric campus network solution that operates with context-based access and policy management for every user, regardless of how they connect.

“We believe customers have two choices to consider as they contend with the remarkable changes brought on by the growth of mobile devices and the BYOD trend,” said Dominic Orr, Chief Executive Officer, Aruba Networks. “The legacy, port-based route brings more complexity, lock-in and expense, whereas the mobility-centric approach from Aruba and Brocade is based on open standards and delivers the freedom of choice and lower costs.”

Brocade and Aruba will also embark on a broader technology initiative to apply SDN principles to campus networks.

Brocade and Aruba are committed to helping current and prospective customers reach a desired end-state. Brocade will support customers and partners through this transition away from its current OEM products and to the strategic integrated solutions with Aruba.