三月将纪念阿鲁巴（Aruba）成立18周年，我们将启动一系列播客，突出了阿鲁巴（Aruba）正在进行的创新和技术卓越。To give us the overview of Aruba’s innovation journey that has resulted in thousands of patents, hundreds of thousands of customers and billions of dollars in revenue, Adrian Hurel, VP of Sales Global Services and Support and Larry Lunetta, VP of WLAN and Security Solutions, recently spoke with Partha Narasimhan, Aruba’s Chief Technology Officer.
The full podcast is available here:
From Air to Edge: 18 Years of Innovation Part 1
From Air to Edge: 18 Years of Innovation Part 2
Here are some excerpted summaries.
主持人：
帕莎，您从一开始就一直在这里。十八年在这项业务中是一个漫长的时间，并且变革是不变的。然而，我们只是被前三家分析师公司中的每位公司（Gartner，IDC和Forrester）评为有线/无线领导者。我们如何保持领导？
帕莎：
Our culture has always been focused on two key principles: Customer First, Customer Last and a relentless drive to innovate. If you don’t maintain that focus, you won’t survive—and many competitors have come and gone over the years.
主持人：
我们将介绍广泛的主题，但让我们从安全性开始。经受了时间考验的创新的重要例子之一是我们的政策执法防火墙。
帕莎：
When Aruba was founded in 2002, we identified security as one of the key challenges for organizations adopting wireless connectivity. That’s why we introduced the Policy Enforcement Firewall (PEF), a Layer 7 stateful firewall that enforces role-based access control across the network, independent of the method of connection. At that time, the market didn’t call it Zero Trust, but essentially that is what it was: The user or device must be authenticated and once that happens, application-layer IT access is granted based on the role of that endpoint. PEF is the enforcement point and it has been so durable that the insurance industry just designated it as “Cyber Catalystsm by Marsh” for its demonstrated ability to reduce cyber risk.
主持人：
Speaking of security, theWPA3 encryptionstandard is now part of the Wi-Fi 6 standard. That came out of your lab, correct?
是的，来自CTO团队的Dan Harkins决定通过引入一种称为WPA3的新形式的加密形式来解决开放网络访问的“星巴克”问题。该技术现在是Wi-Fi 6标准的一部分，并减轻用户担心保护从设备流到公共环境中接入点的数据的详细信息。WPA3是以客户为中心的技术创新的一个很好的例子，我们很乐意代表社区为Wi-Fi 6标准做出贡献。
主持人：
There is this myth floating around that all radios are created equal. Thoughts on that?
帕莎：
We all start with the same chipset and there are plenty of contract manufacturers who will take the Qualcomm or Broadcom chips and paste together a white-label box that anyone can re-label—and there many vendors who take this approach. That may be fine for general internet access, but they fall down badly trying to support high performance, high density applications that are driving digital transformation.
At Aruba, standard chip sets are only the starting point. We engineer for performance and reliability across a range of use cases informed by 18 years of Wi-Fi experience and hundreds of thousands of customers. That means our access points use memory and CPU resources more efficiently than compared to off-the-shelf designs. We have an entire lab to support the design and testing of antenna arrays that minimize interference. We engineer the drivers to support AI-powered software enhancements such as ClientMatch (automatically assigns a device to the highest-performing AP) and AirMatch (automatically optimizes RF settings). The result is not only better performance, but better price/performance. In head-to-head comparisons at equivalent price points we often provide up to twice the throughput vs. competitive products.
主持人：
您提到的功能，例如clientmatch。随着软件对整个Wi-Fi解决方案越来越重要，我们也引导了这里。一旦正确完成了硬件，就全部optimization and automation。Trace that journey for us.
帕莎：
Again, it comes from staying very close to customers and engineering solutions to solve their problems. It’s a long list of innovations that continues to improve the user and IT experience including,
ClientMatch，这解决了阻碍有效漫游的“粘性客户”问题。
RF optimization via播放that uses data from thousands of access points to automatically adjust RF settings to maximum performance.
AI Insighttakes in 1.5 billion data points per day from thousands of customers to automatically monitor, diagnose and help orchestrate network administration.
We have a very unique network diagnostic capability calledUser Experience Insight.With UXI we can tell the networking team how the network is behaving from the user and application perspective. My favorite customer comment about UXI is “I’m tired to sending out surveys to see how my Wi-Fi is working—UXI now does that automatically.”
Live Upgrades我们在AOS 8几年中引入了一个了不起的突破，我们的竞争对手仍未复制。想象一下，升级网络而不分解维护窗口 - 没有网络停机时间。
For application SLAs, we just introducedairslice。Airslice扩展了Wi-Fi 6 OFDMA和MU-MIMO标准，以提供保证的无线带宽和性能，以供各种关键任务应用程序。5G技术可以承诺，但我们正在实现它。
主持人：
这些解决方案中的许多共同主题是人工智能。这无疑是阿鲁巴的核心优势 - 我们如何处理？
帕莎：
Once again, it’s about solving real problems. We have competitors that use AI in their demos but when it comes time to use the product, no one touches it. Solutions like Client Match, AirMatch and AI Insights solve real problems and leverage all of Aruba’s AI strengths:
- 数据：As we discussed, we train our AI models with billions of data points across every type of customer environment.
- Domain Expertise:许多程序员可以找到并实施AI算法，但是他们不知道他们要解决什么问题。凭借18年的经验，我们知道可以通过AI解决哪些问题，哪些技术将最有效。
- 数据科学：确定问题后，我们将拥有一个深入的数据科学家团队，并获得HPE的AI实验室资源。
- 规模：A critical question is: can your models work in enterprise scale environments and produce useful results? Models trained with data from small environments will not “scale up.”
- Maturity:“机器学习”一词很恰当，因为不仅是对现有数据训练的模型，而且还在野外学习并继续改善。我们的部署AI技术比某些竞争对手的部署更长，而解决方案的价值反映了这一点。
Many of these started when our solutions were managed on-prem, but now we deliver in the cloud via Aruba Central. Most people don’t realize we been delivering cloud-based solutions for many years, that some of our biggest customers, like Home Depot are deployed in the cloud and that we have the largest installed base of controller-less access points.
主持人：
这些是伟大的成就，创新如何推动Aruba Central？
关键是,云计算不是一个地方但sim卡ply a deployment option. Aruba Central represents a steady stream of innovation that includes a micro services architecture, a user experience and interface that is tuned for both analytics-based orchestration and streamlined IT operation and a platform that continues to provide a robust set of ever-increasing services that customers can use to build new businesses, new revenue streams and better user experiences.
主持人：
Before we wrap up, what’s coming next?
帕莎：
我们现在的数字和物理tersection. Wi-Fi touches the lives of our customers in profound ways. The analytics, the automation and the performance are all designed to seamlessly enable new experiences and business outcomes—with fewer touches from IT. Wi-Fi 6 will continue to be the wireless technology of choice inside the building based on performance, ease of management and cost. In fact, Wi-Fi 6 will be the de facto on-ramp to 5G services as that functionality comes on stream.
我们知道，物联网将推动许多新的应用程序和或访问点已经并且将继续是IoT解决方案的平台。我们将将许多不同的协议连接到相同的物理基础架构，这将降低物联网连接的成本和复杂性。
最后，无线连接只是智能边缘的开始。作为HPE对云体系结构的边缘的起点，Wi-Fi和关联的分支和校园基础架构将与Edge Compute资源集成到诸如多访问边缘计算（MEC）之类的形式中。
The world is moving to the edge.
主持人：
That’s a lot to look forward to Partha, thank you. Here is the link to the full podcast.
