Hewlett Packard Enterprise Introduces HPE Ezmeral Container Platform 5.1

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Introduces HPE Ezmeral Container Platform 5.1, which provides customers with:

• A unified multi-cluster control plane:  To deploy, run, and manage multiple Kubernetes clusters in hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environments.
• A platform to modernize both cloud-native and non-cloud-native monolithic apps: With differentiated capabilities to containerize monolithic and stateful applications, without the need to refactor code.
• Ready-to-run workload-optimized solutions: To build containerized applications for a wide range of use cases, with their choice of open-source or ISV tools, and deploy them anywhere – on-premises, in any public cloud, or at the edge.

Unified control plane

External Kubernetes cluster management: The container platform offers the flexibility to deploy and manage any Kubernetes cluster from a single pane of glass.

With the 5.1 release, HPE Ezmeral Container Platform provides a unified control plane to deploy applications to Amazon's EKS clusters or to any Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) certified Kubernetes cluster – with extension to Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) clusters.

Trusted private registry for applications: Users no longer have to live with the security vulnerabilities of unknown application images. The HPE Ezmeral Container Platform scans images for security vulnerabilities with image signing – where certified, trusted images can be rapidly and securely deployed. And, HPE implemented role-based access controls (RBAC) so each tenant gets its own secure workspace within the registry.

Istio service mesh integration: HPE is integrating the open source Istio service mesh and providing it as an out-of-box capability on the HPE Ezmeral Container Platform, enabling a service mesh on each cluster while providing the flexibility to selectively deploy Istio on a per-tenant basis.  With tenant isolation, HPE provides granular, tenant-level observability allowing each tenant to independently monitor applications running on Istio. 

Global shared volumes: One of the essential requirements and challenges to deploying stateful applications on containers has been access to shared data, models, and other related artifacts across projects. Stateful applications that need to run in containers need persistent storage to store intermediate application data. Also, most stateful enterprise applications require access to enterprise data. The global shared volumes capability leverages HPE Ezmeral Container Platform’s DataTap capability to provide secure access to shared data across applications. Applications running in different tenants can share code, data, and other artifacts across tenants. HPE Ezmeral Container Platform includes pre-integrated HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric for persistent container storage (private volume) and the shared global storage (global volume).

HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric on Kubernetes: With version 5.0, HPE incorporated a global, edge-to-core, high-performance, multi-protocol (NFS, POSIX, HDFS, S3, CSI) data persistence layer with the pre-integrated HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric. With the 5.1 release, HPE delivers the same capabilities as native Kubernetes storage. The HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric runs as a workload on a Kubernetes cluster.

Ready-to-run solutions

The vision for the HPE Ezmeral Container Platform is to provide workload-specific solutions for a variety of different enterprise use cases while providing a common platform to manage these different workloads. Currently, customers can license HPE Ezmeral ML Ops – a solution built on our container platform – to operationalize machine learning and deep learning models at scale and move from pilot to production with their AI initiatives.

Kubernetes-based applications: With support for open-source Kubernetes, customers can deploy any Kubernetes-based application on the HPE Ezmeral Container Platform.  With the 5.1 release, HPE is integrating (out-of-the-box) and fully supporting the Spark and Kubeflow operators; also supporting a wide variety of Kubernetes-based machine learning tools, such as Argo, Seldon, and many more.

Supporting DevOps processes: HPE is enabling customers to build Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) workflows and processes by providing them with source control and workflow automation tools, such as Github (available in 5.0), Bitbucket Enterprise, and Jenkins (available in 5.1).