HPE Discover 2020 Highlights

Some important news and ideas come from HPE Discover 2020. The virtual edition of this event has concluded with important improvements and news about Greenlake, Cloud Backup Service, PointNext services, etc… but from my point of view, the most important feature in Cloud-Native Application space is the launch of Ezmeral. Let’s see in-depth

The As-a-service model with HPE Greenlake Cloud

New generation on-prem and cloud services are now offering complete coverage in the whole IT stack including new and old applications. “From the edge to the cloud” seems the way to start or revamp the on-premise infrastructure and easily scale-out into the major cloud providers such as AWS, GCP, and Azure.

The reality today, is that every IT element should be verticalized to the purpose of the deployment. In a few words: customer wants a technological partner that really simplify the adoption of the new technologies. And here is the point: HPE Greenlake Cloud Services is the answer from HPE’s house for the IT simplification and digital transformation in a pay-per-use way and with the experience of years with the customers.

 

Technically this is an aggregate of services able to handle the IT of a company, starting from the application and landing to the low level of the infrastructure or the cloud provider with the participation of a great ecosystem of partners such as VMware, AWS, Docker, Microsoft,… (Details here: https://www.hpe.com/us/en/greenlake/services.htm )

Ezmeral

HPE finally is improving the applications with Ezmeral: the answer to modernize, deliver and manage the new generation applications (formerly cloud-native applications). In fact, this new suite of products is a strategic step to enable full coverage of the IT stack. In this way, HPE claims to gain attraction for old and new customers.

This is a complete suite of products that simply enables the management and consumption of the container from the automation pipelines (HPE OneView), to Operations and security. In the middle, the core is represented by the Container Platform. HPE Ezmeral Container Platform is a control-plane for all containerized application and not: with HPE Ezemeral Data Fabric and KiubeDirector is possible to handle the new and old application in the container without refactoring.

Rember that in order to improve performance and efficiency the right choice is to revamp or rebuild applications with the right Cloud-Native Architecting. I would consider this way as a long time transition before the new development.

It’s important to mention the high commitment of HPE in the Open Source: there’s and high involvement in the CNCF. In fact, key components such as KubeDirector,  Secure Production Identity Framework for Everyone (SPIFFE), and SPIFFE Runtime Environment (SPIRE) are maintained as open-source projects.

There’s an interesting blog post in developer.hpe.com introducing in practice how to start using KubeDirector: https://developer.hpe.com/blog/kubedirector-the-easy-way-to-run-complex-stateful-applications-on-kubern. Obviously if you wanna get more, just check the GitHub project at https://github.com/bluek8s/kubedirector 

Thoughts around…

HPE since its changes from the old “Hardware” vendor is demonstrating day by day a great power and energy bringing they customer needs at the center of their products. The service is the key to let new and old customers successfully invest in the digital transformation from the edge to the cloud. In this particular period of our life is important to automate the major parts of the industrial processes in order to reduce manual intervention and keeping guaranteed the primary needs of our society, and HPE wants to be a trusted IT partner able to follow their customer from the edge to cloud.

I’d like to close this post with a video interview in Italian, realized by VMUG.it (me and Andrew Mauro) with the precious collaboration of our good friend Max Mortillaro