HPEはEzmeralソフトウェア戦略を販売できますか？

Hewlett Packard Enterprise（HPE）は今週、HPE Discoverイベントで新しいソフトウェア戦略とソフトウェアブランドEzmeralを発表しました。このイベントは、ハイブリッドクラウドプレーを後押しし、VMwareやIBMなどの競合他社を照準に入れています。Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) rolled out a new software strategy and software brand Ezmeral this week at its HPE Discover event that boosts its hybrid cloud play and puts competitors like VMware and IBM in its crosshairs. It’s a two-part strategy comprised of HPE GreenLake and Ezmeral. GreenLake, which is the vendor’s pay-as-you-go, cloud-delivered IT portfolio, isn’t new. And at last year’s Discover event, HPE announced it would deliver its entire portfolio as a service, via GreenLake, by 2022. This week, HPE announced new GreenLake cloud services across container management, machine learning (ML) operations, virtual machines (VMs), storage, compute, data protection, and networking. And all of these cloud services are accessible via a point-and-click catalog on GreenLake Central, the central management and visibility console for hybrid IT environments. The brand-new piece is Ezmeral — essentially an enterprise platform built on top of Kubernetes. Ezmeral unifies HPE’s software portfolio, and it allows customers to deploy and manage containerized applications across any infrastructure: bare metal, VMs, public and private clouds, and on HPE and non-HPE hardware. With Ezmeral, HPE’s taking on VMware’s Kubernetes platform and portfolio, Tanzu, and Red Hat’s OpenShift Kubernetes platform. It’s worth noting that Dell Technologies owns 81% of VMware (and may be considering buying the rest of the cloud-software giant), and IBM owns Red Hat. Both of these software companies are the crown jewels — and revenue drivers — for their parent companies. For HPE, articulating the “platform portion” of CEO Antonio Neri’s “Edge to Cloud Platform-as-a-Service” strategy was critical, said Matt Eastwood, IDC SVP of enterprise infrastructure, cloud, developers, and alliances. “Without Ezmeral, HPE would be heavily dependent on partner IP from organizations like VMware, Red Hat, Nutanix, Google, and Microsoft,” he said in an email to SDxCentral. “In addition to the margin challenge that this would present for HPE, it also lacked differentiation when one considers the full spectrum of edge-to-core needs in the market. That said, many of these partner organizations have considerable market presence, which HPE needs to overcome.” While Ezmeral will help HPE “insert their platform into the hybrid cloud discussion,” especially when coupled with GreenLake Central hybrid cloud management and HPE’s core compute and storage product, HPE still has to sell its vision to customers, he added. “What will be critical for them going forward will be to build out increasingly deep relationships with the tier-one cloud service providers so that their hybrid cloud story is complete and attractive for customers that will increasingly be looking for end-to-end solutions to their hybrid cloud needs,” Eastwood said. HPE CTO Kumar Sreekanti, who now heads the company’s 8,300-engineer-strong software team, said the company’s up to the challenge. Sreekanti left VMware, where he was VP of research and development responsible for storage, to found BlueData. He served as CEO of that company, which developed a platform for artificial intelligence (AI), ML, and analytics on containers until HPE bought BlueData in 2018. In an interview with SDxCentral, Sreekanti described HPE’s software strategy as a horizontal and vertical axis. “Horizontal being how do you make anything elastic, scalable, automated, optimized, etc. So, it’s the carpet bombing, for lack of a better word,” he said. “How do I take something I built, and make it available? That, to me, is GreenLake.” In other words, GreenLake provides the software-as-a-service (SaaS) piece, and Ezmeral provides the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) layers. Ezmeral software allows customers to run cloud-native or non-cloud-native applications in containers without refactoring them. It also allows customers to manage multiple Kubernetes clusters with a unified control plane, and it uses BlueData’s high-performance distributed file system for persistent data and stateful applications. “How do you take a specific application, be it CI/CD, be it Spark, and how do you optimize and provide the best workload configuration for a platform? And how do I orchestrate those containers, and then how do I instantiate certain services on the top of it, and how do I run it? So Ezmeral software, which we want to make it available as a licensed version outside of GreenLake as well as in GreenLake, belongs in that vertical category,” Sreekanti said. The Ezmeral portfolio includes the now-renamed Ezmeral Container Platform (based on HPE’s BlueData and MapR acquisitions), data fabric (from MapR) and ML ops (from BlueData), IT ops and automation (using HPE’s OneView and InfoSight technologies), managed cloud controls and cost optimization, and security software (acquired from Scytale earlier this year) “And we will continue to innovate around that, to provide more and more workloads,” Sreekanti said. “That’s the strategy for us.” While this strategy sounds similar to other tech giants — like VMware’s Tanzu and Red Hat’s OpenShift platforms — it has a couple aces up its sleeve. “We acknowledge the PaaS layer is very common,” and built on Kubernetes, Sreekanti added. “Our competitive differentiation is that we have built this via the BlueData technology.” Sreekanti and Tom Phelan, also from VMware, founded BlueData to make it easier for enterprises to run AI and analytics workloads, which are inherently data-intensive “and some are very sticky with respect to the persistency of the storage” in a distributed, on-demand environment,” Sreekanti explained. “And this is what our Ezmeral container platform has the ability to do: instantiate both stateful and stateless workloads.” When coupled with MapR’s scalable file system, Ezmeral emerges as the clear choice for running AL and ML workloads, he said. “We have not seen either OpenShift or Tanzu focusing on H2O, DataRobot, Kafka, TensorFlow, Spark, and even Hadoop, to some extent. We specialized [in these workloads] and we brought a lot of added advantage.” Plus, Sreekanti added, customers building and deploying containerized apps don’t want to be tethered to VMs. “With Tanzu, my biggest worry as a customer would be: VM was a great innovation 15 years ago. Why do I want to attached myself to the VMs when I can actually run on bare metal? I don’t need two levels of abstraction, and containers are getting very secure. There is a clear path to microservices and the ability to make it very nimble. And the platform that we are offering is a native. It doesn’t need any VMs and it doesn’t need to be attached to VMs.” IDC analyst Crawford Del Prete called Ezmeral the right move for HPE. “The company is 100% focused on the software that enables hybrid cloud infrastructures and the IP to manage customer information,” he said in an email to SDxCentral. “This is not new for the company, but it is a ‘doubling down’ on IP with which the company can differentiate. HPE is taking the (fairly) recent software acquisitions that they have made and is pulling them into a strategy to enable better management of IT infrastructure apps and information in hybrid and public clouds.” And while this is similar to VMware’s approach, “in my opinion is not a surprise as it’s a high-margin play,” Del Prete added. “Obviously, it’s early days for HPE, but this is where they want to compete.”