The Pensando Distributed Services Platform (DSP) for HPE Servers delivers a powerful suite of software-defined network and security services like firewall, micro-segmentation, and telemetry - boosting network performance by moving these services to their ideal location, the server edge, where the transition between network and server occurs. This approach eliminates the need for discrete appliances, simplifies infrastructure design/operations, strengthens security posture, and improves total cost of ownership (TCO) while providing unmatched telemetry, I/O visibility and troubleshooting insights.
The massive expansion in the number and diversity of applications, as well as an explosion in the amount of data being generated and transported through enterprise data centers, has pushed the architectural limits of modern IT infrastructure. Traditional "scale-up" approaches - where networking services are embedded into top-of-rack switches, or networking and security appliances - are no longer able to keep up, suffering from either performance, agility or scale limitations as policy tables bloat and the number of active flows reaches into the millions. The limitations and expense of this centralized resource model have led data center architects to limit the core network infrastructure functions to simply transporting IP traffic with as little latency and jitter as possible.
Just as compute and storage systems are adopting a "scale out" approach, so too the networking and security elements of the data center must adopt a Scale-out Services Architecture and these functions need to find a new home in this model. The ideal place to instantiate these services is the server edge (the border between the server and the network) where services such as firewall, encryption, tunneling and VPN termination can be delivered in a scalable manner. In fact, since each server edge is tightly coupled to a single server, it needs to be aware only of the policies related to that server and its users. This approach naturally scales - as more services capabilities are made available when new servers are added.