HPE Ezmeral Runtime Enterprise recognized by Gartner

[RichardHatheway]

HPE Ezmeral Runtime Enterprise Included in Gartner® Report on Major Cloud Service Providers

OVERVIEW

In August 2021, Gartner^® published The Innovation Leader’s Guide to Navigating the Cloud-Native Container Ecosystem. In this report, they discussed how cloud-native technologies are beginning to evolve “to encompass a broad set of technologies, projects and vendors.” They also stated that “By 2026, more than 90% of global organizations will be running containerized applications in production, which is a significant increase from fewer than 40% in 2020.”¹

In October 2021, Gartner published their Cloud Market View, 2020-2021. In this report, Gartner states “Organizations are accelerating cloud adoption in the wake of the pandemic. The economic, organizational and societal impacts continue to be catalysts for digital innovation and the adoption of cloud services, especially for use cases that support a hybrid workforce.”²

Gartner estimates that “By 2024, nearly half (45.3%) of the included forecast segments will have shifted to investments in cloud technologies (an increase from 33.4% in 2020).” They also state that, “By 2024, cloud shift estimates that more than half of all applications will be purchased as SaaS and consumed via the public cloud, as opposed to traditional (noncloudy) software.”²

In the Cloud Market View, 2020-2021 report, Gartner recognized the HPE Ezmeral Container Platform (now known as HPE Ezmeral Runtime Enterprise) as one of the “Major cloud service providers offering container management capabilities that can run on-premises or on other public cloud IaaS.”² HPE was listed in the Competitive Landscape of Public Cloud Container Services & Container Management Software and SaaS category.

SITUATION

Businesses that don’t consume any public cloud services are few because most are now operating in some sort of a hybrid-cloud model that incorporates not only public and private clouds, but also on-premises environments. This change is largely driven by IT organizations seeking greater operational efficiencies, flexibility, and scalability.

Other changes, including the increased use of automation, the continued growth of big data, the increased use of big data to drive business insights and new product development, and the need for agile and automated deployment of applications also impact business decisions to accelerate their digital transformation efforts. For the purposes of this article, those transformation efforts include the adoption and use of application containerization technologies.

Enterprise organizations are adopting containers and embracing cloud-native microservices architecture to accelerate the speed of application development and innovation and benefit from greater efficiency and portability. Kubernetes has emerged as the de facto, open-source standard for container orchestration and a fundamental building block for cloud-native architectures.

As enterprises embrace the use of containerization, the adoption of container management platforms is increasing due to the integration of many components critical to running containerized workloads in production environments. In addition to container runtime and orchestration capabilities, container management platforms typically provide enterprise IT organizations with a variety of other features such as developer tools, automation capabilities, and a management console.

Gartner states that, “Hyperscale cloud providers offer integrated cloud infrastructure and platform services (CIPS) capabilities that allow users to develop and operate cloud-native applications with a unified environment. Almost all of these providers can deliver an effective experience only within their public cloud environments” [emphasis added]. They also state that, “Software vendors offer platform software that can be used to deploy a private IT or public cloud service [emphasis added]. Vendors in this category offer on-premises, edge solutions and may offer either marketplace or managed services offerings in multiple public cloud environments.”¹ Gartner lists Hewlett Packard Enterprise as a “key software vendor” in this category.

In the Cloud Market View report, Gartner also states, “Hyperscale cloud providers are expanding their suite of offerings in edge computing market to complete and complement [emphasis added] their cloud offerings.”²

Interestingly enough, from an application container management platform perspective, HPE Ezmeral Runtime Enterprise already has those capabilities that other vendors are just now beginning to include!

Let me show you how your business can benefit from HPE’s industry-first enterprise-grade container orchestration platform.

ENTERPRISE-GRADE CONTAINER MANAGEMENT

HPE Ezmeral Runtime Enterprise is the industry’s first enterprise-grade, container orchestration platform designed to run modern applications (both cloud-native and non-cloud-native) with persistent data. It deploys 100% open-source Kubernetes for orchestration, provides a state-of-the-art file system and data fabric for persistent container storage, and provides enterprises with the ability to deploy non-cloud-native AI and analytics workloads in containers.

While it’s a straightforward process to deploy modern, cloud-native applications in containers, those typically only represent a small portion of enterprise applications. Believe it or not, most enterprise applications are still the older, non-cloud-native apps with a monolithic architecture and persistent data storage (i.e, legacy applications). Those older applications are the ones that can really benefit from the agility and efficiency that containers bring. The challenge businesses face is how to run those monolithic applications in containers, without having to rearchitect them.

This is where HPE can help. With HPE Ezmeral Runtime Enterprise, enterprises can now easily overcome the challenges they face by extending the agility and efficiency benefits of containers to more of their enterprise applications, including non-cloud-native legacy applications. Whether those applications are running on bare-metal or virtualized infrastructure, on-premises, in hybrid- and multi-cloud environments, or at the edge, HPE Ezmeral Runtime Enterprise gives enterprises the ability to deploy and manage those applications in containers without having to rearchitect their non-cloud-native applications.

And as enterprise organizations extend the use of containers and Kubernetes beyond development and testing into production environments, one of the key issues they must address is the issue of security. The good news is that HPE Ezmeral Runtime Enterprise includes enterprise-grade security controls that integrate with identity providers such as AD/LDAP. It also has single sign-on, SAML integration, role-based access controls for secure access to the platform and uses Falco for proactive threat detection and alerting.

As Gartner recommended in The Innovation Leader’s Guide, “Technology and service providers of container management offerings should support not only container management but also application platform as a service (aPaaS) features and other complementing management across cloud deployment scenarios (hybrid cloud, multicloud and distributed cloud).” They also recommended that “Technology and service providers of infrastructure and application platform products targeting cloud-native workloads should facilitate customers’ transitions from traditional IT operation teams to new roles by enhancing cloud-native operations capabilities such as observability and immutable infrastructure.”¹

This is exactly what HPE Ezmeral Runtime Enterprise does.

The HPE Ezmeral Runtime Enterprise platform provides businesses with numerous additional value-added features that go above and beyond simple container management, allowing the enterprise to run a variety of different applications. Those additional value-adds include enterprise-grade security, observability, data connectivity, integrated data fabric, multi-cluster Kubernetes management, policy management features, public cloud cluster imports, multi-tenancy, a unified control plane, and runtime orchestration.

Application modernization is another driving differentiator for enterprises. The next wave in modernizing the data estate—both on-premises and in the cloud—is being driven by the need to support business, infrastructure, and digital transformation efforts that will deliver greater business agility, improved efficiency, and enhanced innovation. Enterprises must prepare to ride this wave by accelerating their investment in containerized cloud-native infrastructure.

HPE Ezmeral Runtime Enterprise can help your business accomplish those initiatives.

SUMMARY

HPE Ezmeral Runtime Enterprise provides businesses with all the application modernization tools they need in one solution, allowing them to extend the agility and efficiency benefits of containers to more of their enterprise applications, both cloud-native and non-cloud-native. 

For more information about HPE Ezmeral Runtime Enterprise or any of the HPE Ezmeral products, visit our webpages or contact your local sales rep.

1 – “Gartner, The Innovation Leader’s Guide to Navigating the Cloud-Native Container Ecosystem,” Arun Chandrasekaran, Wataru Katsurashima, August 18, 2021.

2 – “Gartner, Cloud Market View, 2020-2021”, Tracy Tsai, 10 October 2021

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Richard

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