HPE Turns to Containers With Its Ezmeral Software
The News: During HPE’s virtual Discover event this week, the company unveiled its new Ezmeral software platform which includes container orchestration and management, AI/ML and data analytics, cost control, IT automation, AI-driven operations, and security. The purpose of Ezmeral is to enable the flexibility to deploy and manage containerized applications at scale, on any infrastructure. Read the press release from HPE here.
Analyst Take: After deconstructing its software assets a few years ago, it’s no surprise that HPE’s renewed software focus is on containers, given its continued push with cloud services. Since containers are self-contained operating environments that enable applications to run on different kinds of computing infrastructure, this bolsters HPE’s infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) plays, and also shows that HPE is willing to have its software be compatible with other cloud infrastructures.
The vendor openly admits that Ezmeral is directly taking on VMware’s Tanzu Kubernetes portfolio and IBM Red Hat’s OpenShift platform. HPE’s CTO Kumar Sreekanti explained that HPE is creating its own swim lane in a next generation container. In the battle of Kubernetes-based container software, HPE also touts its ability to provide “persistent storage” through its scalable MapR file system and its AI and machine learning capabilities with HPE BlueData. Sreekanti knows a lot about BlueData as he was the founder of the company that was acquired by HPE in 2018.
What may give HPE the advantage here is that the BlueData AI machine learning software runs both stateful and stateless workloads, which allows HPE to provide the same cloud experience in a cloud native, or on premise workload in the data center, or even in real time at the edge. The ultimate goal of HPE is that of CICD (Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery), which is confirmed by Srkeenati.
HPE anticipates delivering versions of Ezmeral in the future that will run on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud as the vendor wants continued momentum with this open source, multi-cloud container platform.
