Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. announced the general availability of the HPE Container Platform Monday, four months after it entered beta.

Launched in November, the platform combines an assortment of technologies developed by BlueData Software Inc. and MapR Technologies Inc., which were recently acquired by HPE.

The company describes the Container Platform as an “integrated turnkey solution” that uses BlueData software as the container management control plane and MapR’s distributed file system as a unified data fabric for persistent storage.

It’s essentially an enterprise-grade container platform that can support both cloud-native and noncloud-native applications that run in containers, which are self-contained operating environments that enable applications to run on many different kinds of computing infrastructure. Based on the open-source Kubernetes container orchestration software, it can run on bare-metal servers or virtual machines, either on-premises, in a private or public cloud, or at the network edge.

Kumar Sreekanti, senior vice president and chief technology officer of Hybrid IT at HPE, said he believes the next phase of container adoption in the enterprise will require both deeper innovation and a new approach. He said the HPE Container Platform provides both the speed and the agility enterprises need to accelerate their application development.

“Customers benefit from greater cost efficiency by running containers on bare-metal, with the flexibility to run on VMs or in a cloud environment,” Sreekanti said. “We’re leveraging the innovations of the open-source Kubernetes community, together with our own software innovations for multitenancy, security and persistent data storage with containers.”

The company also announced new professional services through HPE Nextpoint. The idea is to provide expert advice, support and training services for customers looking to adopt the HPE Container Platform.

In addition, HPE announced new reference configurations for data-intensive application workloads such as artificial intelligence, data analytics, edge computing, Internet of Things and machine learning.

Tom Phelan, a fellow in HPE’s big data and storage organization, appeared on SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio theCUBE during the KubeCon 2019 conference in San Diego last November, where he discussed HPE Container Platform in more detail:

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