Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has announced that its container platform, unveiled in November 2019, is now generally available. The HPE Container Platform is an enterprise-grade container platform designed to support both cloud-native and non-cloud-native applications using open source Kubernetes—running on bare-metal or virtual machines (VMs), in the data center, on any public cloud, or at the edge.
In addition, HPE is introducing new professional services to ensure faster time-to-value and several new reference configurations for data-intensive application workloads such as AI, machine learning, deep learning, data analytics, edge computing, and IoT.
“The next phase of enterprise container adoption requires breakthrough innovation and a new approach,” said Kumar Sreekanti, senior vice president and chief technology officer of hybrid IT at HPE. “Our HPE Container Platform software brings agility and speed to accelerate application development with Kubernetes at scale. Customers benefit from greater cost efficiency by running containers on bare-metal, with the flexibility to run on VMs or in a cloud environment.”
According to HPE, the container platform addresses a common industry proble: Many organizations started their container journey with stateless workloads that are easier to transition to a cloud-native microservices architecture. However, the majority of business applications today are monolithic, stateful, and non-cloud-native workloads that live throughout the enterprise. Organizations seek to modernize and containerize these applications without significant refactoring—while ensuring production-grade security and persistent data storage. While some early on-premises Kubernetes deployments used containers with VMs, this approach is no longer necessary. Running containers on bare-metal provides significant advantages to organizations seeking to modernize and run containers at scale in the enterprise. These include: reducing unnecessary overhead, avoiding lock-in with a proprietary virtualization format, and eliminating “vTax” licensing costs.
The HPE Container Platform is aimed at reducing cost and complexity by running containers on bare-metal, while providing the flexibility to deploy in VMs or cloud instances so that businesses can embrace a hybrid cloud or multi-cloud approach to deploying Kubernetes. Organizations seeking greater cost savings, efficiency, utilization, and application performance can eliminate the need for virtualization and expensive hypervisor licenses, by running containers directly on bare-metal infrastructure.
Built on innovations from HPE’s recent acquisitions of BlueData and MapR, the HPE Container Platform is an integrated turnkey solution with BlueData software as the container management control plane and the MapR distributed file system as the unified data fabric for persistent storage.