HPEはEzmeralでVMware、IBM Red Hatに挑戦

CEOのAntonio NeriがCOVID-19の陽性反応を発表したにもかかわらず、Hewlett Packard Enterprise（HPE）は本日、仮想ディスカバーイベントを開始しました。また、新しいソフトウェアブランドとポートフォリオ、HPE Ezmeral、および追加のGreenLakeクラウドサービスも展開しました。Despite its CEO Antonio Neri announcing he tested positive for COVID-19, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) kicked off its virtual Discover event today. It also rolled out a new software brand and portfolio, HPE Ezmeral, and additional GreenLake cloud services. HPE Ezmeral (the Spanish word for “emerald,” a gemstone said to have transformational powers), encompasses all of HPE’s software products including container orchestration and management, artificial intelligence(AI)/machine learning (ML) and data analytics, cost control, IT automation and AI-driven operations, and security. This includes technology developed in house as well as through acquisitions like Scytale, MapR, and BlueData. And as part of today’s announcement, HPE said that HPE Ezmeral Container Platform and HPE Ezmeral ML Ops will be made available as cloud services through HPE GreenLake. Both the container platform and ML Ops are based on MapR and BlueData technology. Ezmeral directly targets VMware’s Tanzu Kubernetes portfolio and IBM Red Hat’s OpenShift platform, said Kumar Sreekanti, HPE CTO and head of software. “Without a question, I think Tanzu and OpenShift are the two swim lanes, and Ezmeral will be a third swim lane with very unique opportunities,” he said. “We are the only ones that has integrated, persistent storage,” which is built on MapR’s scalable file system. It also uses BlueData’s technology, which runs containerized stateful and stateless applications. “And it is the only one that runs AI/ML workloads while running CI/CD, and it is built on the top of open source Kubernetes,” Sreekanti added. In fact, Sreekanti co-founded BlueData and served as its CEO until HPE acquired the big data analytics company. Last August, Sreekanti became HPE CTO for hybrid IT. And in May HPE CEO Antonio Neri formed a new software team that consolidated all of HPE’s software assets with Sreekanti at the helm. “As we transform the company, software is a huge and critical and important part of our effort,” Sreekanti said. “We have 8,300 software engineers across the organization. We have as we move forward, we wanted to make sure we build and provide customers the solutions that both run standalone as well as in the GreenLake.” Ezmeral fulfills the standalone option. This software can run on any infrastructure, either on bare metal or in virtual machines, on both HPE and other vendors’ hardware, and in any cloud, Sreekanti said. Meanwhile, GreenLake is HPE’s consumption-based, as-a-service portfolio. Last year at HPE Discover, Neri pledged to deliver HPE’s entire portfolio as a service by 2022. It’s also worth noting that in 2016, HPE sold off its software business to Micro Focus for $8.8 billion as part of then CEO Meg Whitman’s push to focus on networking, storage, and technology services. Since then, it has steadily acquired software companies including Nimble Storage, which HPE bought for $1 billion in 2017. This acquisition also gave HPE its InfoSight AI-management tool, which it has since pushed across its data center products. During a press and analyst Q&A session, Neri fielded a question about whether its new Ezmeral software portfolio is just its old software business “in some fancy new green clothing.” The short answer, Neri said, is no. “We made the decision to spin the software business at the time because we felt that was not a cohesive strategy,” he said. “It was a portfolio of very good assets in their own domains, but not architected for the cloud reality and the AI reality as well. So for us, it was hard to bring all those assets together in an integrated, very efficient set of architectures that were cloud native.” Selling its software business to Micro Focus also freed HPE up to “really pivot harder” to its everything-as-a-service focus, he added. “It has taken up a little bit of time, but I’m super excited with what we are doing with HPE Ezmeral, with our container platform, with the integration of the acquisitions we have done, with the utilization of AI in the form of HPE InfoSight, and also the security aspect with Scytale. What we have now is an integrated strategy, and we do it in a true open source-oriented approach.” In addition to its Ezmeral portfolio, HPE’s software push also includes its cloud-delivered GreenLake services. And today the vendor announced new GreenLake cloud services across container management, ML operations, VMs, storage, compute, data protection, and networking. All of these cloud services are accessible via a self-service, point-and-click catalog on GreenLake Central, which provides visibility and consistent management across customers’ hybrid IT environments. “Think of this as our advanced software platform that provides customers with a consistent experience for all their applications and data through an operational console that runs, manages, and optimizes their hybrid IT estate” including on-premises data center and public clouds, said Keith White, SVP and GM of GreenLake Cloud Services. “We go beyond just basic management operations to provide real insight and tools needed for things like cost analytics, capacity management, and even compliance to really enable a well governed hybrid cloud. So customers can get real-time telemetry on how their environment is operating and advice on how to optimize it, along with how to remediate compliance issues.” The new GreenLake cloud services are built on pre-integrated building blocks, which are available in small, medium, and large configurations. HPE offers 17 of these pre-integrated configurations, and White says the vendor can have these up and running in customers’ environment in 14 days or less. “The easiest way to think about these building blocks is kind of like Lego bricks,” White said. “With Legos, you can build almost anything from a few standard blocks. These can look and feel like custom offerings. But as we do it through these standard building blocks and [small, medium, and large] tee-shirt sizes. This really accelerates time to market for the customer solution, and more importantly, accelerates time to value for them.” GreenLake, White said, remains one of the fastest-growing businesses in HPE with more than $4 billion in total contract value, about 850 enterprise customers worldwide, and over 700 partners selling GreenLake. And while all of HPE’s sectors saw revenue declines related to the global COVID-19 pandemic during the second-quarter of 2020, HPE GreenLake saw 17% annual revenue run-rate growth to $520 million during the quarter. HPE’s dismal Q2 results prompted the company to cut all employees’ salaries and implement other cost-saving measures that it says will save at least $1 billion by the end of fiscal 2022. And as part of the company’s cost-cutting plan, it will also accelerate its pivot to as a service, Neri said on a call with investors. “As the world emerges from the global pandemic, business continuity will depend on solutions that advance IT resiliency and power remote workforces securely, extend connectivity, reinvigorate customer engagement, and enable business model evolution,” Neri said. “This is why we must accelerate our strategy to deliver everything as a service [from] edge [to] the cloud.”