The show floor is already getting busy, both with people and tiny football playing robots.
Here's one of the bots in action – getting a bit overwhelmed by the attention at the end it seems. According to our tour guide they're not just on the floor to look cute and entertain – they demonstrate technology and connectivity that can be used in manufacturing.
The auditorium is starting to fill up as CEO Antonio Neri is expected on stage imminently
And here's the man himself. He's addressing the delegates, acknowledging that there's a mix of technologists and business leaders here. He's also – as expected – talking about the future of AI including 'physical AI', AKA robots. Anecdotally, this is a trend that I'm hearing more and more, which feels very "back to the future" – it was a topic of conversation pre-pandemic, as was digital twinning...
Networking, cloud, and AI are the watch words here – a bit of a shift from the edge to cloud to AI mantra of Discover Las Vegas 2024, but an understandable one. The Juniper Networks acquisition (which he's discussing now) has perhaps obviously made networking an important story for HPE. Realistically, it's also one of the main enablers of edge computing anyway.
Neri adds that he's excited to share some news about how Juniper Networks (now HPE Juniper Networking) will integrate with the company's existing Aruba Networking portfolio.
Joining Neri on stage now is Rami Rahim, formerly CEO of Juniper Networks, now VP and GM of networking at HPE. He's talking up the importance of networking in the future of enterprise infrastructure, including AI infrastructure connecting thousands of GPUs together for massive processing power.
Rahim is also talking about the idea of "self driving" networks. Expect to hear more about this both here at Discover and from HPE in the future. It seems to be a key marketing point, USP, and concept for how AI networks will work in the future.
Rahim is now talking about the differences between Juniper Mist and HPE Aruba Networking Central, how Mist was built for the cloud while Aruba was more of an on-premises play.
"We have two industry leading network AI platforms, Aruba Central and Juniper Mist, Aruba Central and Juniper Mist, both delivering real and valuable results to our customer each," says Rahim. "Every day by adopting our platforms, our customers have seen up to a 90% reduction in travel tickets and on site service calls. They've also seen a drastic decrease in the amount of time they have to spend in hands on network operations."
"Each of these solutions is unique and compelling in different ways," he says.
The two platforms are being "cross pollinated", says Rahim. Some elements of Mist are moving to Aruba Central and vice versa. Eventually, says Rahim, there will be no difference between the two.
HPE is also launching a joint WiFi-7 access point that unifies Juniper and Aruba technology. This will be launching in Q3 next year, around the time of HPE Discover Las Vegas 2026.
You can read more on these announcements in my full write-up here.
We're now onto GreenLake, the ever shifting backbone of HPE offerings. For those who have been familiar with HPE for a while, you'll know that GreenLake was originally pitched as something akin to a cloud service, with on-demand and consumption-based pricing at its core. It's now morphed into something like a managed service.
"We make deploying and managing AI data centers simpler and much more efficient, but we don't stop there; with GreenLake only HPE can provide end to end data center solutions across compute, storage and networking, along with expertise and services," Rahim explains.
Some more product announcements: the QFX5250 switch with HPE tomahawk 6 technology and MX301 edge router. Once again you can read more here.
Rahim is also talking up the AMD Helios and Nvidia AI Factory announcements from earlier in the week.
"I could not be more proud of our partnership with Nvidia, and I believe these joint solutions will give customers the assurance they need to deploy our routing technology with Nvidia's cutting edge products with confidence," he says of the continuing Nvidia partnership.
On AMD, he adds: " Iam stoked to announce the HPE will be offering AMD Helios AI rack worldwide starting next year. The Helios rack scale architecture is an open platform for large scale AI workloads, putting industry standards at the forefront of the design. So recall I said earlier that scale up networking has been uncharted territory. Well, that's about to change. I'm very excited to announce an HPE Juniper network and scale up youth nets, which designed specifically for Helios AI rack. This is an industry first scale up solution using open standard Ethernet, in other words, no proprietary vendor login."
Wrapping up, Rahim says: "It's been, what, less than six months since we closed this acquisition, and I hope you agree with me that we have already made massive progress in our integration efforts, the fact that we are here today announcing new products and solutions and not just announcing the intent, but showing them the help on the Discover show floor should tell you that we are committed not only to our vision, but to truly bring it into life."
"Now as we look forward, one thing is clear, it's time for a new generation of networks – HPE networks – to be a new leader," he continues. "We have the tech. We have the track record of innovation. We have the worldwide go to market scale, including a fantastic partner community.
"We have a bold vision, and we have the team that can execute on that bold vision and bring it all to life. So a very big thank you for believing in us and for supporting us. We could not do it without you. Thank you for joining us on this journey."
Neri is now back on stage, continuing Rahim's thoughts saying: "Personally could not be prouder of what a new combined network HPE has already accomplished and what they will do next. Rami and I had the same vision from the very beginning, which was to create a new network together, and I truly believe we are on the path to do so."
We're now moving onto hybrid cloud and, inevitably, GreenLake.
"Hybrid Cloud gives you resilience, flexibility and speed with more control and lower cost, and that's why customers are choosing GreenLake," claims Neri. "When we first mentioned GreenLake, our goal was not to build another cloud. It was to deliver a better cloud experience, one that ... [offered] a consistent cloud operating model across your entire IT estate."
A few connectivity issues have meant I've not been able to post some updates on GreenLake, Alletra Storage, and security. There will be some standalone articles on these announcements from me later!
A few bullet points on what was announced in the meantime
- New capabilities for HPE Morpheus Software, including software-defined networking for VMs hosted on HVM hypervisor in VM Essentials and Morpheus Enterprise Software
- Apstra Data Center Director from Juniper, which will be integrated into Morpheus
- Stretched cluster capabilities for Morpheus
- Zerto cybersecurity software is being integrated into Morpheus
- HPE VM Essentials backup on Veeam Data Platform 1.3
- HPE Alletra Storage MP X10000 Data Intelligence Nodes with Nvidia AI Data Platform reference design
Neri is now going over some of the supercomputing announcements that were recently made just before and at SC conference in October. You can read more about the new Cray GX5000 and K3000 systems here, and the DoE supercomputer announcements here.
Welcome to Day Two of HPE Discover Barcelona 2025. No fainting robots or other foibles on the way to the main theatre this morning, sadly, but we're expecting the networking general session (aka keynote) to kick off any moment.
Networking has been one of the big topics so far this week, with former Juniper Networks CEO Rami Rahim taking up almost the same amount of time on stage during Antonio Neri's keynote yesterday as Neri himself.
Roll VT, it's time to start the general session.
Rami Rahim is on stage now. "It has been quite a year for us at networking inside of HPE," he says, which feels like a bit of an understatement.
The networking side of HPE's business is now 20,000 strong, says Rahim. "It's absolutely remarkable how quickly Aruba and Juniper have come together and started working side by side on a common vision, with a common objective, to create a new industry leader in network," he adds.
"Networking has never been more important in our industry, and networking has never been more important for HPE," says Rahim. This has been the theme of the whole event – HPE is a server, storage, AND networking company. Aruba has, of course, been in place for 10 years but this emphasis on networking is stronger than ever, in my experience.
We have a customer on stage now for a chat with Rahim from Lanes Group, a water treatment provider, to explain how important networking is for their business. What this means, in practice, is connecting CCTV cameras, sensors, and other operational data. They're also implementing AI for predictive maintenance, so anticipating a problem before it becomes an issue, as well as agents.
There's about an hour left of the general session and apparently we're going to be getting some live demos of the technology. Always a brave choice...
Another exec has taken to the stage to talk about uptime and the importance of the "self driving" network enabled by Marvis (a technology that came over from Juniper but is now with Aruba via the 'cross pollination' policy) and Aruba Central (still part of Aruba).
A network being "up" is not the same as being "good", he says, and really UX needs to be part of the networking conversation.
After a short VT based on two real life scenarios, we're now into what a self-driving network means. There are three elements: speed of rollout, fewest tickets and the perhaps more subjective idea of "better business outcomes".
The self driving network is dependent on AI agents and microservices, he says, highlighting the existing reputation of HPE Aruba Central and Juniper Mist.
HPE are leaning hard on the example of autonomous vehicles to explain this – how we've gone from cars with at best an oil warning light to parking assistants, blindspot cameras etc
We're having a demo of Marvis, which is a natural language trouble-shooting bot within Mist, to be perhaps a little reductive. It's a previously created demo, which is probably for the best for all involved.
The announcements are coming thick and fast. An inevitable focus for a European conference is digital sovereignty and we've just had the announcement that microservices through Aruba Networking Central will be available 'on prem' – inverted commas because some of the data processing is still done in the cloud, but inferencing is done on premises.
Ok some more innovation announcements. First "The power of agentic AI" – Apstra Data Center Director can identify if one device "catches a cold ... who will start sneezing next". Marvis can then be used to identify the issues and help fix them via natural language interactions. Worth noting that while these are novel to HPE, Marvis and Apstra have been imported through the Juniper acquisition.
Next innovation: This is about the importance of open systems, which the presenter says is "important for cloud and neocloud providers". Consequently the QFX5240 and QFX5250 switches are available immediately with support for SONiC (Software for Open Networking in the Cloud).
Innovation three: Data center networking operations are now integrated with Opsramp.
This means a "seamless solution that locates your application and network issues", he says.
Innovation four appears to be... Rami Rahim??
Oh no, innovation four the QFX5250 data center switch. This is apparently the frist switch using Broadcom Tomahawk 6 chips and also features direct liquid cooling, which is a specialism for HPE on its server infrastructure. You can read a bit more about the QFX5250 here.
AE Natarajan is next on stage talking about networking for the post-internet, AI era
"When we first started the internet, it was built and architected for downloads," he says. This could lead to buffering issues for large files (e.g. from Netflix), which led to caching to overcome this issue.
AI doesn't work this way, in his words AI "never sleeps". Cached data is instantly obsolete in the world of AI, and upload/download is symmetrical. Constantly, the network architecture needs to be completely different.
Ok, we're onto network security. "While AI is making our life and we can speed up things. Guess what? AI is also doing the same things to the bad actors in the world. It's the same tools that is available that these guys become more sophisticated," he says.
David Hughes, SVP and GM of SASE and security, is now on stage talking about the overlap of networking and security.
"Traditionally, the networks team is tasked with ensuring that there's great performance and reliable connectivity for people, for devices, for workloads, he says. "[For] decades now, networking has at its foundation ... the ability to connect any endpoint to any other endpoint."
"Meanwhile, the security team is tasked with protecting users data and workloads, and historically, this is being done by restricting, often with solutions that are altered on or overlaid on top of the template," he explains, adding that users are often "caught in the middle", which causes a bad experience for them.
"obody wants to choose between performance and protection. We need both, and what we believe is that a network with physical security is genius," Hughes says, before rattling through some of Aruba's pedigree in security despite being a networking company.
The addition of Juniper to HPE has enhanced this, Hughes says, highlighting the SRX appliance as a particularly stand-out example.
The answer to some of these issues is zero trust everywhere – stopping lateral movement, isolating compromised endpoints such as laptops etc.
Additionally, HPE has some product ranges that can help sitting in the categories of unified SASE, full-stack AIOps, universal zero trust networking access (ZTNA), and hybrid mesh firewall.
"Delivering with integral security, there's no need to choose between performance and protection," Hughes concludes. "We are innovating with the goal of providing solutions that align the working and security teams behind a common zero trust mission."
Rahim is back on stage to wrap up for the day. "Networking has never been more important," he says, "and this is why it is for technology. We have the track record of innovation. And most importantly, as I think you have seen by now, we have the team to deliver on everything you are seeing here at discovers. HPE networking was created to be you leader with a whole vision and the ability to execute on that vision and to bring it to light."
With that he thanks the audience and it's lights up in the auditorium. This is the end of the live blog, but not the end of our coverage, so stay tuned for more throughout this week.