HPE Aruba’s latest CX 10040 switches, described as a distributed services or smart switch, doubles the scale and performance of its predecessor, offering 8 Tbps of non-blocking switching capacity and 1.6 Tbps of L4 stateful traffic inspection. This enables enhanced security functions such as firewall, DDoS protection, encryption, NAT, and network segmentation.

Figure 1. HPE Aruba Unveils Advanced Switches to Power Data Center and Campus Upgrades.

HPE Aruba’s data center networking solutions leader, explained that the CX 10000 platform breaks down networking silos by embedding advanced security directly into the network fabric and providing real-time visibility into both east-west and north-south traffic. This allows organizations to orchestrate, secure, and scale their networks with greater agility, turning infrastructure from a static cost center into a strategic advantage. Figure 1 shows HPE Aruba Unveils Advanced Switches to Power Data Center and Campus Upgrades.

Launched in 2022, the CX 10000 series is designed as a 10/25Gbps Ethernet top-of-rack L2/3 data center switch with an integrated programmable data processing unit (DPU), originally developed by Pensando (now part of AMD). The DPU removes the need for separate appliances by handling low-latency traffic, security, and load balancing tasks directly on the switch.

Combined with Aruba’s AOS-CX network OS, the DPU supports software-defined cloud, compute, networking, storage, and security services, delivering wire-rate routing and switching, network telemetry, automation, and security for distributed workloads.

CX 10040: Expanding Its Role in Enterprise Networking

The new CX 10040 is a more powerful 2U device supporting 100/400Gb Ethernet and equipped with four DPUs. While still primarily positioned as a top-of-rack switch with intelligent automation, near line-rate security, and deep telemetry, its role is broadening. As enterprises and service providers increasingly adopt hybrid and multi-cloud strategies, secure and high-performance interconnectivity is critical. According to John Gray, the switch can serve as a border leaf or DCI (data center interconnect) node, providing embedded encryption, precise time synchronization, and scalable policy enforcement. This allows secure data transport across clouds, campuses, and edge sites without sacrificing performance.

In large enterprises using collapsed-core network designs, the CX 10040 acts as a high-performance aggregation switch, consolidating services, simplifying architecture, and natively enforcing security policies—thereby reducing complexity and operational costs. Additionally, its agility and security make it ideal for colocation facilities and edge locations. With integrated Layer 4 stateful security and an automation-ready platform, it enables rapid deployment while maintaining strong control and visibility over distributed networks.

Industry analyst Alan Weckel from the 650 Group notes that the CX 10040 greatly expands capacity and functionality for enterprise customers. He highlights its enhanced feature set compared to the original CX 10000, enabling more services to run directly within the network, which lowers total cost of ownership (TCO) and improves security.

Positioned as a VMware alternative

Gray explained that HPE Aruba is pairing its newly launched Morpheus VM Essentials plug-in—a hypervisor-based solution designed for hybrid cloud virtualization—with the CX 10040 switch to provide a strong alternative to Broadcom’s VMware offering.

HPE Aruba Positions CX 10040 as a VMware Alternative

John Gray explained that customers looking to move away from VMware’s cloud and Cloud Foundation products can use HPE Aruba’s CX 10040 switch combined with its Morpheus VM Essentials plug-in to replace distributed firewall, microsegmentation, and many VMware NSX capabilities. Morpheus handles VM orchestration, automation, and policy management, effectively delivering similar functionality.

Alan Weckel from the 650 Group believes enterprises will find the CX 10040 appealing as it offers a way to mitigate Broadcom’s rising VMware license fees. He noted the success of the original CX 10000 in security and edge gateway roles and highlighted that the CX 10040 can also support collapsed-core architectures and provide an alternative to VMware, expanding platform flexibility.

Competition and Industry Context

Cisco recently announced its own AMD-based DPU switch, the N9300 Smart Switch series, while companies like Microsoft and IBM use DPU technology to accelerate security policies and offload workloads, improving efficiency for AI and cloud operations.

However, HPE Aruba claims a three-year lead on this technology compared to Cisco. Gray criticized Cisco’s upcoming switch for offering only zone-based firewalling, which he described as basic VLAN segmentation, whereas Aruba delivers stateful Layer 4 firewalling across the CX 10000 family. He added that thousands of CX 10000 switches have been shipped, supported by a large partner ecosystem.

Campus Network Modernization

To modernize campus networks, Aruba introduced four new CX 6300M Layer 3 enterprise access and aggregation switches. These 1U switches offer 24 or 48 ports of 10/100/1000BASE-T access with up to 4 ports supporting 1G/10G/25G/50G uplinks. Gray noted the switches are designed to support higher-speed networking for IoT, AI, and high-performance computing.

The CX 6300M supports Aruba’s Virtual Stacking Framework (VSF), allowing up to 10 switches to be stacked for scalability. They also provide real-time monitoring and analytics for proactive management and quick troubleshooting. Network segmentation capabilities enable automated policy enforcement across wired and wireless networks. Integration with Aruba ClearPass simplifies enterprise-wide security policies for user and device access.

Introducing Wi-Fi 7 Access Points

Alongside the new switches, HPE Aruba launched Wi-Fi 7 access points: the Aruba Networking 720, 740 Series, and indoor/outdoor 760 Series. These APs offer traffic prioritization to meet the real-time demands of AI and cloud applications.

The 740 Campus Access Series features three 2×2 MIMO radios delivering triband coverage on 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, and 6 GHz bands, supporting up to 4.7 Gbps aggregate data rates for dense environments. They also support 2.5 Gbps Ethernet for fast data transfer and include integrated IoT radios for BLE or 802.15.4/Zigbee devices.

Source: NETWORK WORLD

Cite this article:

Priyadharshini S (2025), HPE Aruba Introduces New Range of Switches for Data Center and Campus Modernization, AnaTechMaz, pp.128