Pensando Distributed Services Platform Silver

Range/Series Overview

IMPORTANT: This Range/Series overview section describes the range of which this product belongs. Features of different versions might be mentioned and may not apply to the specific product on this page. Please view Specs for specification of product.

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.

Features Summary

• Always-on Telemetry and Deep Observability
  Pensando Distributed Services Platform brings sophisticated wire-speed telemetry to HPE servers, providing real time observability and insights for network and storage, without affecting application performance.
  Always-on telemetry at the server edge enables proactive end-to-end troubleshooting and problem reporting, minimizing down-time and significantly reducing mean time to repair (MTTR).
• Micro Segmentation for KVM and Containerized Application Tiers
  The Pensando Distributed Services Platform isolates KVM/Hyper-V and containerized application tiers from each other on Hewlett Packard Enterprise servers and achieves "zero-trust security" enforced within each machine by the Pensando Distributed Services Card (DSC).
  Microsegmentation can be applied – per VM, container, or workload – on the DSP subsystem with full isolation from host-based vulnerabilities.
• Distributed Stateful Firewall for Bare-Metal, KVM, and Containerized Environments
  Pensando DSP enables policy enforcement and permitted list communications between servers within the data center (East-West security).
  Pensando DSC implements an enterprise-class, centrally managed stateful firewall at each server edge.
  Advanced firewall functionality includes Application Layer Gateway (ALG), and packet-based DDoS attack protection (Flood, TCP SYN, fragmentation, Ping-of-Death (PoD), and more).
• Simplified Infrastructure Operations
  Pensando DSP eliminates multiple discrete network and security appliances such as an East-West stateful firewall.
  Eliminates complexity and latency associated with network tromboning-effect through multiple appliances.
  A simplified architecture and always-on visibility results in fewer outages and faste mean time to repair (MTTR).
  Replaces multiple appliances, reducing costs and complexity, all while improving security.
  Pensando DSP lowers total cost of network and security services per server.

Specification Summary