Hewlett Packard Enterprise has announced the HPE Container Platform, an enterprise-grade Kubernetes-based container platform designed for both cloud-native applications and monolithic applications with persistent storage. With the HPE Container Platform, the company says, enterprise customers can accelerate application development for new and existing apps—running on bare-metal or virtualized infrastructure, on any public cloud, and at the edge.
The HPE Container Platform, built on innovations from HPE’s acquisitions of BlueData and MapR, together with Kubernetes, is aimed at reducing cost and complexity by running containers on bare metal—while providing the flexibility to deploy on virtual machines and cloud instances. According to the company, it provides greater efficiency, higher utilization, and improved performance by “collapsing the stack” and eliminating the need for virtualization.
With the solution, IT teams can manage multiple Kubernetes clusters with multi-tenant container isolation and pre-integrated persistent storage. In addition, developers have secure on-demand access to their environments so they can develop apps and release code faster, with the portability of containers to build once and deploy anywhere.
“Application development is migrating to containers, and Kubernetes is the de facto standard for container orchestration,” said Kumar Sreekanti, senior vice president and chief technology officer of Hybrid IT at HPE. “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 modernization, optimized for bare-metal and extensible to any infrastructure from edge to cloud.”
HPE says the new platform is a turnkey solution that addresses emerging challenges faced by organizations, with BlueData software as the control plane for container management, the MapR distributed file system for persistent data with containers, and Kubernetes for container orchestration.
The challenges include the need to address security, multi-cluster management, and load balancing as the use of containers and Kubernetes is extended to production environments; the rise of new use cases are for edge computing, databases, and more; and the fact that a significant portion of enterprise applications and systems are not cloud-native and would benefit from containerization but re-architecting or refactoring existing applications as cloud-native is time-consuming and expensive.
HPE's approach extends the benefits of containers beyond cloud-native microservices-architected applications, providing the ability to containerize non cloud-native monolithic applications with persistent data storage.
For more information, go to www.hpe.com.