Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. is combining technology from two recent acquisitions into a container platform that it says can run both cloud-native and non-cloud-native applications.

The HPE Container Platform, which is being introduced today at the KubeCon 2019 conference in San Diego, leverages distributed processing technology the company picked up with last year’s acquisition of BlueData Software Inc. and storage expertise it acquired with its recent purchase of MapR Technologies Inc.

The platform is based upon Kubernetes, the open-source orchestrator for containers, which are self-contained operating environments that enable applications to run across many different kinds of infrastructure.

The platform is intended for “bare-metal” deployments that don’t use virtual machines, although VMs are supported. HPE said it provides for “one-click” deployment of containers across different kinds of infrastructure, giving developers the ability to write once and run anywhere.

HPE is particularly interested in helping organizations shift legacy applications that don’t move easily to the cloud. “Monolithic applications have tentacles all over the place,” said Kumar Sreekanti (pictured), HPE’s chief technology officer for Hybrid IT and previously co-founder and chief executive of BlueData. “We have proven technology to run monolithic applications on containers with Blue Data while you’re working to take them into a microservices environment over time.”

Microservices is an emerging application architecture that breaks software into modular components that are used only when needed. Containers are frequently used to host microservices.

BlueData was working with Kubernetes well before its acquisition by HPE, focusing its efforts on optimizing the framework for stateful applications, or services that retain data between sessions. MapR announced support for persistent storage in mid-2018, providing consistent data access across cloud and on-premises deployments.

Support for stateful applications makes it easier for organizations to deploy containers for production uses in which persistent access to data is critical. That’s especially important for monolithic legacy applications, which were built to assume constant access to storage.

Breaking with the industrywide trend toward targeting new software to cloud deployment, HPE will sell its container platform for use on-premises. “Customers want cloud-native services because they need agility to respond to markets, and if they can do that on-prem next to their data they can then have the option of where to deploy,” Sreekanti said. “We believe this is a significantly lower hurdle for clients to go over than moving to the public cloud.”

HPE said its approach yields a more efficient and lower cost path to application modernization. It cited research International Data Corp. research that found that more than 92% of large enterprises expect to invest in containers by 2023 and a 451 Research LLC study that found that 95% of new applications will use containers.

The HPE Container Platform will be a complete “turnkey” package that includes BlueData software as the control plane for container management, the MapR distributed file system and object store for data persistence within containers and native Kubernetes for orchestration. The company said it will provide enterprise-grade security, performance and reliability at the lowest cost by using containers on bare metal.

HPE also plans to provide a set of cloud migration services through its PointNext services division that “looks at your applications and put in place a step-by-step process to identify the  right applications, get your organization prepared and put the right teams in place,” Sreekanti said.

Pricing and availability will be announced in the first quarter of 2020.

Photo: SiliconANGLE