Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) takes on, well, containers with the Container Platform, an enterprise-grade Kubernertes-based container platform customers can deploy either on bare metal, any public cloud or virtualised infrastructure.
The Container Platform is built on two HPE acquisitions, namely BlueData and MapR, together with "100% open source" Kubernetes. The company claims it reduces costs and complexity by running containers on bare metal, while offering the flexibility to deploy on virtual machines and cloud instances. Thus, customers get greater efficency, higher utilisation and improved performance by "collapsing the stack" and eliminating the need for virtualisation.
The system is primarily aimed for large-scale Kubernetes deployments across a wide range of use cases, including machine learning, edge analytics, CI/CD pipelines and application modernisation. IT teams can manage multiple Kubernetes clusters with multi-tenant container isolation and pre-integrated persistent storage, and developers get secure on-demand access to app-development environments, with containers allowing one to build and deploy anywhere.
BlueData software acts as the control plane for container management, while the MapR distributed file system provides persistent data with containers. Kubernetes, of course, handles container orchestration. Such an approach, HPE says, extends the benefits of containers beyond cloud-native microservices-architected applications, providing the ability to containerise non cloud-native monolithic applications with persistent data storage.
“Application development is migrating to containers, and Kubernetes is the de facto standard for container orchestration,” HPE adds. “We’re combining our expertise and intellectual property from recent acquisitions together with open source Kubernetes to deliver an unmatched enterprise-class container platform. Our container-first approach will provide enterprises with a faster and lower cost path to application modernisation, optimized for bare-metal and extensible to any infrastructure from edge to cloud.”
HPE Container Platform orders open on Q2 2020.
