HPE Campus EX Switching Portfolio Deep Dive with Umang Saini

Operational disruptions are rising as machine-speed attacks force organizations to increase the pace of security and vulnerability patches. For organizations caught in between uptime and risk, our in-service software upgrades (ISSU) preserves user experience and business continuity without maintenance windows. Building on this foundation, the EX5200 combines every-port multigig connectivity, rich telemetry, and scalable Virtual Chassis to improve visibility, streamline operations, and support growing campus demands. Tune in for a demo of our latest capabilities, along with a closer look at the EX5200. Umang Saini of HPE’s product management team presented the session at Networking Field Day 41.

Saini introduced the EX5200, launched a few weeks earlier as the top of HPE’s EX access line. It comes in 24- and 48-port PoE and non-PoE models with 10G multigig on every port, a 3,500-watt PoE budget, 90 watts on any port, and stacks of up to ten members over 400G of full-duplex stacking bandwidth. Uplinks double those of the EX4400 to eight 25G or two 100G ports. The switch boots to a login prompt in 55 seconds, with 45 to 47 seconds targeted by year end. It supports campus fabrics, group-based policy, and Zero Trust Inline Segmentation, along with secure boot, MACsec with AES-256, streaming telemetry, and flow-based telemetry that can flag attacks from the first packets of a new flow. Because the EX5200 runs classic Junos, it doesn’t support containers, and delegates questioned the two-OS strategy. HPE said the Junos and AOS-CX lines will remain separate and recommended choosing platforms by requirement.

The second half addressed uptime. Saini demonstrated software upgrade orchestration in Mist, where operators can target an org, site, or switch role, set images per product line, and run upgrades in parallel, staged, or on a schedule. When a delegate noted that daily CVEs make full reboots untenable, Saini presented hitless upgrades on EX access platforms, aimed at keeping traffic loss below 50 milliseconds. Daemons save state, the backup switch and line cards upgrade first while forwarding stays programmed, and a graceful switchover lets the former primary upgrade last. Control plane downtime is 60 seconds or less, and a failed step rolls back without dropping traffic. In the EX4400 stack demo, pings and a Teams call ran uninterrupted while 802.1X sessions, PoE, and LLDP stayed up. HPE’s argument is that patching no longer has to mean negotiating maintenance windows, which matters more as the pace of vulnerabilities speeds up.