Hewlett Packard Enterprise Inc. today is kicking off its Discover virtual conference by making a statement of sorts about its commitment to be a major software player, albeit in the corner of the market devoted to helping organizations run complex computing fabrics.

Three years after selling off much of its software portfolio to U.K.-based Micro Focus International plc, HPE today announced that it’s consolidating much of its software portfolio under a new brand: Ezmeral.

The new unit will encompass container orchestration and management, machine learning, data analytics, information technology cost control, IT automation and security. Containers are self-contained operating environments that enable applications to run on many different kinds of computing infrastructure.

The Ezmeral brand name is derived from esmeralda, which is the Spanish word for emerald. “Emeralds are believed to confer power and the ability to predict future events, strengthen intelligence, ease stress and enhance immunity,” the company said in a press release.

The company also introduced seven new services under its Greenlake IT-as-a-service offering. The Ezmeral Container Platform and Ezmeral ML Ops will initially be offers as cloud services through GreenLake for containerized application development and machine learning using DevOps agile practices.

The announcements are part of HPE’s continuing campaign to deliver its entire software portfolio through a range of subscription based, pay-per-use and as-a-service offerings, by 2022. “We have doubled down on investment during the pandemic because the companies that do will be the companies that come out of this time stronger,” said Chief Executive Antonio Neri (pictured) in a briefing with press and analysts. “We have to move faster now than before.”

Neri, who tested positive for COVID-19 last week and is “well on the way to recovery,” said the focus on Ezmeral will be on edge computing and cloud enablement, leveraging acquired technologies like the BlueData Software Inc. distributed deployment platform and MapR Technologies Inc. filesystem.

Cohesive strategy

He said the decision to spin off software assets three years ago that included application delivery management, big data, enterprise security, information management, governance and IT operations management was the right one “because we felt there was not a cohesive strategy architected for the cloud reality where we now live. This freed us up to pivot harder on this new way to deploy software,” he said. HPE employees 8,300 software engineers.

HPE describes Ezmeral as encompassing software to “to run, manage and secure the applications, data and IT that run your business – from edge to cloud,” said Chief Technology Officer Kumar Sreekanti. In addition to ML Ops and the Container Platform, the portfolio includes

• Secure Production Identity Framework for Everyone (SPIFFE) and SPIFFE Runtime Environment, a pair of open-source technologies for performing service authentication that came with the acquisition of Scytale Inc. early this year;
• HPE Managed Cloud Controls, a suite of services and software for cloud compliance and cost management;
• HPE Data Fabric, a unified data platform based on technology developed by MapR; and
• HPE OneView for infrastructure management and HPE Infosight for operational predictive analytics.

A foundational element of the portfolio is Container Platform, a container and management package announced last fall that uses BlueData software as the container management control plane and MapR’s distributed file system as a unified data fabric for persistent storage. HPE said the platform can be used to run containers at scale on any infrastructure, including enterprise data centers, colocation facilities, multiple public clouds and at the edge.

Based on the open-source Kubernetes container orchestration software, the Container Platform is part of a renewed HPE commitment to support for open source software, Neri said. “We now have an integrated strategy but in an open source-oriented approach that’s truly cloud-native but allows customers to run their own cloud-native applications,” he said.

Open at the core

HPE said it is actively engaged with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Kubernetes community on open-source projects such as KubeDirector, SPIFFE and SPIRE, and that SPIFFE and SPIRE yesterday were promoted from sandbox to incubation-level hosted projects.

The new Greenlake packaged offerings cover a variety of existing core computing, networking, cloud services and data protection functions that are available in 17 pre-integrated configurations for small, medium and large infrastructure scenarios.

“Thinks of these like Lego bricks,” said Keith White, head of GreenLake Cloud Services. “Customers can quickly and easily choose what services they want and PointNext [HPE’s service arm] will install and configure them. Greenlake customers will have the option of trying services before buying them. As a way to underscore a renewed commitment to speed, HPE said it will provision any purchased services within 14 days.

Ezmeral software is generally available using traditional license models, including HPE Ezmeral Container Platform and HPE Ezmeral ML Ops as a software license subscription on any infrastructure or public cloud. The Container Platform and ML Ops offerings are available now in beta test as cloud services through GreenLake.

Photo: HPE