HPE ‘laps’ networking rivals with distributed services switch portfolio update; new Wi-Fi 7 APs

“[Cisco] is a little bit late to the party [and] we’re not stopping with the switches [and] we’re continuing to lap the field with integration to the full-stack solution as well, so we welcome the competition,” said HPE’s data center networking, AI and security infrastructure lead John Gray.

HPE Aruba Networking has updated its version of a smart switch and its wireless portfolio as enterprises refresh their traditional data center and Wi-Fi environments to prepare for AI, the company revealed on Wednesday.

The new HPE Aruba Networking CX 10040 is the latest in HPE’s distributed services switch line, also known as “smart switches,” which include networking functions and accelerated services, such as security, that HPE first unveiled three years ago, said John Gray, data center networking, AI and security infrastructure lead for HPE.

Cisco Systems, for its part, in February introduced its Nexus 9300 series of smart switches with embedded AMD data processing units, the tech giant unveiled at Cisco Live EMEA 2025. Like HPE’s comparable distributed services switches, the Nexus 9300 series can be deployed as regular switches or with advanced features.

“We launched this category of switch [in 2022] … Cisco, welcome to the party,” Gray told CRN.

Cisco’s entry into the market is validating the category of smart switches, he said.

“I think their weight in the market is going to [have] customers saying: ‘Hey, maybe I need to rethink or re-evaluate how I build and design my next-generation data center or campus with a solution like this with the embedded capability,” Gray said. “[Cisco] is a little bit late to the party [and] we’re not stopping with the switches [and] we’re continuing to lap the field with integration to the full-stack solution as well, so we welcome the competition and, in the end, it will be better for customers with better performance and economics.”

HPE said that its new CX 10040, which also includes an AMD Pensando DPU, doubles the scale and performance of the widely deployed HPE Aruba Networking CX 10000 distributed services switch that was first introduced at the end of 2021. The latest switch supports AI use cases and offers the same services as its predecessor 10000 series, including built-in firewalling, in-line encryption, and precision telemetry for increased security, greater observability and more efficient server operation, according to the company.

The CX 10040 is designed for higher end use cases, such as service provider or enterprise colocation environments, Gray said.

“The value proposition around a distributed services switch is, rather than having to deploy a separate Ethernet switch and a separate firewall appliance to handle those functions, we can meld those capabilities into a 1U or 2U form factor, right within a rack at 10x the scale for really a fraction of the cost,” he said.

For channel partners leading with this product line, HPE’s distributed services switch family offers a “highly differentiated” offering compared to the competition that dramatically lowers the cost and complexity associated with deploying multiple, dedicated appliances and agents, Gray said.

“Customers are considering deploying software agents on the servers, whether it be 100 servers or 1,000 servers, to perform that zero trust security capability. Think things like VMware NSX, for example, or other third-party vendors, and each of those servers cost US$20-US$40 apiece for those server licenses, times the number of servers that are deployed, [and] all that can be consolidated into the distributed services switch,” Gray said.

Jasper, Indiana-based HPE Aruba partner PIER Group provides IT to the research and education industry. Giving these large university campuses with research-heavy traffic firewall-like capabilities without actually having a firewall that can slow down the network is a big benefit to this customer base, said Shannon Champion, vice president of solutions architecture for HPE Aruba partner Pier Group.

“Firewalls are challenging, and everybody wants visibility, but putting a firewall everywhere in a network really doesn’t make sense financially, and that’s kind of this other paradigm shift,” he said. “I’m excited for our customers because it gives us a viable product to evaluate for some of the research science networks.”

A switch with built-in security functions and AI is an “interesting tool in the toolbox” for partners architecting networks for their customers, Champions said.

“I’m surprised it’s taken this long, honestly, for others to get on the bandwagon,” he said.

HPE is also announcing its virtualization offering, Morpheus VM Essentials, is being integrated with the HPE Aruba CX 10000 networking switch series. This integration will let businesses unify the orchestration of virtualized and physical network and security services, such as distributed firewall and microsegmentation across VMware ESXi, KVM and bare metal hosts, creating an open virtualization model, HPE said.

Morpheus VM Essentials, said HPE’s Gray, is a full-stack VMware migration solution.

“The two trajectories for our channel partners is they could actually go off and sell the standalone Ethernet switch and security infrastructure upgrade with the CX 10040 and many of them have been very successful in doing that, but for those customers that are that are looking at this more broadly, which there are many customers reconsidering how they’re going to migrate their virtualization deployment, and looking at it from a full stack perspective, that gives our partners a whole different level to sort of call into those customers as a strategic advisor and offer that full stack solution beyond just networking,” he said.

Wi-Fi 7 update

On the wireless front, HPE unveiled four new HPE Aruba Networking CX 6300M campus networking switches that operate on a more compact footprint. The new switches provide faster data speeds for IoT, AI, or high-performance computing use cases with baked-in security services. The new switches provide encryption protocols, precision timing, and application recognition and control (ARC), which enables enterprises to meet multiple types of data security, volume, and bandwidth service level agreements (SLAs) on a single switch, HPE said.

The latest campus switches will give partners more deployment options for their customer base, Gayle Levin, head of product marketing, wireless for HPE Aruba, told CRN.

“[The new switches] are very compact and deliver a lot of payload. They are very good for IoT [and] include 90-watt PoE, and that allows for uses like smart lighting, etc., as well as being able to do more work in those smaller environments, be it retail or education. We’re seeing a lot of interest from them,” she said.

Alongside the new switches, HPE is expanding its Wi-Fi 7 portfolio with access points (APs) and capabilities for AI-powered indoor and outdoor connectivity for data, voice, and video communications use cases. The new APs include the indoor HPE Aruba Networking 720 and 740 Series and the indoor/outdoor 760 Series. Each of these APs offer a unique network slicing capability called dynamic application prioritization for transmission priority and performance suitable for AI and cloud-delivered applications.

“We are expanding our Wi-Fi 7 portfolio, providing more options and really democratizing Wi-Fi 7 so that it is accessible for many more different types of customers,” Levin said.

As a result, HPE is also developing promotions for channel partners, she said.

“There is a trade-in promotion to help them get their customers to where they need to be,” Levin said.

The mission of HPE’s most recent announcements is to highlight how the company and its Aruba Networking arm are increasingly becoming more tightly aligned as enterprise networking needs evolve.

“We’re continuing to innovate across our broader portfolio, with more CX switching, more Wi-Fi access points, all managed by [HPE Aruba] Central for that single pane of glass and that flexibility, whether you want to deploy on-prem or in the cloud, in a private cloud as a managed service, [or] as part of Greenlake,” she said.