Smart Routing with HPE Aruba Networking SSE

Matt Hum (matt.hum@hpe.com)

Smart routing is a unique concept that may spur on some questions but is part of the “secret sauce” of our SSE platform. At its core, Smart Routing creates a comprehensive connectivity mesh from agent to a static list (typically all) of our PoPs. By regularly monitoring these paths, our SSE platform can enforce Smart Routing by identifying the best-performing route and dynamically adjust traffic flow based on the source and destination PoP. This approach ensures optimal performance and efficiency.

Let’s illustrate this with an example. In our recorded demonstration, we access a remote server through the agent. We then utilize the Agent Debug tool to trace the traffic path and determine the destination IP of the current PoP, which in this case is named Chell.

In this instance, we apply a traffic conditioner specifically to this IP to introduce latency. You’ll observe the latency increase to the PoP, and we’ll wait for the latency detection to take place.

Once we confirm that the current PoP is consistently underperforming (rather than experiencing a temporary network issue), we identify the next best path and reroute the traffic through a new PoP, referred to as Joker in this demonstration.

This is a breakdown on how we apply Smart Routing to traffic, however bear in mind that this is a demo environment, and settings and video speed have been tweaked to showcase a comprehensive view of Smart Routing. You typically would not want traffic constantly shifting paths in any production environment, as this would cause out-of-order packets and other issues with multiple retransmits.