HPE aims to address non-cloud apps in hybrid IT

HPE has kicked off what it claims is its largest-ever annual Discover conference with a focus on delivering technology for the next age of IT.

Speaking at the start of the virtual event, CEO Antonio Neri, who had previously tested positive for coronavirus, said: “This is a very serious virus and I feel fortunate I am well enough that I can join you at HPE Discover.”

Neri said the coronavirus pandemic had created challenges not only for business, but for the whole of society. 

According to Neri, IT must now move beyond information, because gathering more and more information does not necessarily lead to better decisions. “We are coming to the end of the information era,” he said. “The next decade must be about the age of insight.”

According to Neri, this new age of insight is being driven by digital transformation.

HPE itself is on a digital transformation journey, in which it plans to offer everything it sells as a service by 2022 to become an edge to cloud platform as a service company.

According to John Schultz, lead of HPE’s transformation office, although public clouds are extending to on-premise datacentres, they are unable to address 70% of customer workload requirements.

HPE sees an opportunity to provide something analogous to the IBM/RedHat OpenShift platform to support enterprises that want the flexibility to run workloads on-premise or in the cloud. The company has positioned itself to provide these hybrid cloud users with a single set of controls to manage both on-premise and cloud systems, and provide automation of IT operations.

Keith White, senior vice-president and general manager for HPE Greenlake Cloud Services, said: “Nearly every customer is looking for a hybrid solution to modernise their datacentre.” 

Many of the easy applications have been migrated over to the public cloud, said White, but 70% of enterprise applications still reside on-premise.

The company used the Discover 2020 event to introduce the HPE Ezmeral software portfolio, which it said has been designed to help enterprises accelerate digital transformation across their organisation, from edge to cloud. The portfolio of products includes container orchestration and management, artificial intelligence, machine learning and data analytics, cost control, IT automation and AI-driven operations, and security.

According to HPE, the suite of tools can be deployed to enable organisations to increase agility and efficiency, unlock insights, and deliver business innovation.

HPE said the Ezmeral Container Platform and Ezmeral ML Ops for machine learning tools will be made available as cloud services through HPE GreenLake.

With the Ezmeral Container Platform, HPE said customers will be able to run cloud-native or non-cloud-native applications in containers without costly refactoring and manage multiple Kubernetes clusters with a unified control plane.

HPE said it has provided support for stateful applications and those that require persistent data – which, generally, have not been developed for cloud-native computing – via HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric and the KubeDirector open source project.

It said the Ezmeral ML Ops software uses containerisation to streamline a machine learning model across on-premise, public cloud, hybrid cloud and edge environments by using DevOps to standardise machine learning workflows.

“Customers benefit by operationalising AI/machine learning data science projects faster, eliminating data silos, seamlessly scaling from pilot to production, and avoiding the costs and risks of moving data,” said HPE.