Adopting a hybrid approach to cloud storage solves the problems associated with pure public-cloud strategies; allowing companies to choose where data is stored — in an on-premises database or in the cloud — dependent on each workload’s specific needs.

But while there are huge benefits to the hybrid model, management across disparate environments can become a headache. Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. is claiming to have leveraged the technologies of recent acquisitions MapR Technologies Inc. and BlueData Software Inc. to solve this problem, creating a platform that can run containerized apps on either bare metal or virtualized infrastructure.

“We brought those technologies together to give the customer’s the choice of 100% Kubernetes, to run both stateful and stateless workloads under the same pane of glass,” said Kumar Sreekanti (pictured, left), senior vice president and chief technology officer of hybrid IT at HPE.

Sreekanti and Robert Christiansen (pictured, right), vice president, cloud strategist at Cloud Technology Partners, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host John Troyer (@jtroyer), chief reckoner at TechReckoning, during the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event in San Diego, California. They discussed how the HPE Container Platform aims to solve the management problems associated with hybrid cloud environments. (* Disclosure below.)

Consistency across developmental environments

“You have to have consistency in your development environments,” Christiansen said. “When you have a consistent plane, a control point across all [environments], no matter where you put your clusters … you have the ability to build an operating model that is consistent to go forward.”

This simplicity frees developers from concerns about where workloads are running, allowing independent operational and process development.

The acquisition of BlueData gave HPE the container expertise that underlies the platform’s ability to automate deployments of intelligent applications. But “containers do not solve persistent storage problems,” Sreekanti said. This was solved by integrating MapR’s technology to create a “robust and sophisticated datastore that gives you persistency for the containers,” he added.

The platform supports 100% Kubernetes and is open source, allowing multi-cluster Kubernetes management. “So, Robert says, ‘I am a developer. I want [Kubernetes version] 1.19.’ And Stu says, ‘ want to have 1.17 because I’m stable on that,’” Sreekanti said. “You can have both the clusters, along with the BlueData epic controller clusters, in the same pane of glass.”

Sreekanti confirmed that the Container Platform will support newer versions of Kubernetes as they are released. “We wanted to give that flexibility so the developers can deploy whatever the native new version is coming up under the umbrella of the HPE Container Platform,” he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event. (* Disclosure: Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither HPE nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE