HPE Launches Container Platform Going All In On New Cloud Architecture

The News: Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) today announced the HPE Container Platform, the industry’s first enterprise-grade Kubernetes-based container platform designed for both cloud-native applications and monolithic applications with persistent storage. With the HPE Container Platform, 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. Read the full press release on Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Analyst Take: I believe the announcement is an important and timely one for HPE as the hybrid cloud discussion continues to grow and the narrative toward multi-cloud, open source and containers builds momentum. With a growing competitive landscape, I think now is a good time for HPE, which is well positioned, but certainly is smaller than some of its competitors, to stake their claim and deliver a solution that meets the demands of the modernized IT environment.

Acquisitions Drove HPE’s Ability to Execute

To provide a bit of context, the HPE Container Platform leverages 100 percent open source Kubernetes and is built on f0undational technologies that HPE acquired when the company purchased BlueData and MapR. I’ve long talked about the method to the madness with many of the acquisitions made by HPE over the past few years, but this announcements starts to show the bigger vison that CEO Antonio Neri and the executive team have for HPE.

It’s less about Bare Metal and More about Flexibility

The announcement talks a lot about the value proposition of running the platform on bare metal, and this approach is certainly en vogue right now, however, I believe what is most attractive about the HPE Container Platform is the broader flexibility to run it regardless of the environment such as virtualization and cloud instances. Given the heterogeneous nature of most enterprise IT infrastructure today, the ability to have a platform to modernize with containers running cloud native applciations, while concurrently running legacy workloads on-prem is the ideal situation for most enterprise IT environments.

HPE sweetens the pot for users of the new container platform by tying in pre-determined persistent storage and multi-tenant container isolation.

Overall Impressions

I believe that the HPE is on the right track. Modernized IT will continue to be more open source, more container driven and more flexible for workload and data distribution. The HPE Container Platform Solution shows promise to address the challenges of next generation IT and can reduce cost and complexity by running containers on bare-metal, but doesn’t sacrifice the importance of yielding to legacy environments running virtual machines nor the importance of (multi) cloud instances.

It will be good to watch the market acceptance and follow customer case studies that Hewlett Packard Enterprise puts out as the solution goes to market and gains traction. Conceptually though, it is on a good trajectory.

Futurum Research provides industry research and analysis. These columns are for educational purposes only and should not be considered in any way investment advice.

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Image: HPE

The original version of this article was first published on Futurum Research.