Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has introduced Ezmeral, a brand and software portfolio to help enterprises accelerate digital transformation across their organisation, from edge to cloud.
 
Ezmeral spans a complete portfolio – including container orchestration and management, AI and ML, data analytics, cost control, IT automation, AI-driven operations, and security – so organisations can increase agility and efficiency, unlock insights, and deliver business innovation.
 
The portfolio plays a role in HPE’s edge-to-cloud platform-as-a-service strategy. HPE has also introduced more GreenLake cloud services, which provide an agile, lower cost and consistent cloud experience everywhere. As part of news, HPE announced that the Ezmeral Container Platform and ML Ops will be made available as cloud services through GreenLake to bring more speed and simplicity to containerised application development and devops agility to the ML lifecycle.
 
Ezmeral Container Platform software provides the flexibility to deploy and manage containerised applications at scale on any infrastructure, in enterprise data centres, colocation facilities, multiple public clouds and at the edge. Users can run cloud-native or non-cloud-native applications in containers without costly refactoring, manage multiple Kubernetes clusters with a unified control plane, and leverage a distributed file system for persistent data and stateful applications through innovations such as Ezmeral Data Fabric and the KubeDirector open source project. Now Ezmeral Container Platform will also be delivered as a cloud service through GreenLake.
 
Ezmeral ML Ops software leverages containerisation to streamline the entire machine-learning model lifecycle across on-premises, public cloud, hybrid cloud and edge environments. It introduces a devops-like process to standardise machine-learning workflows and accelerate AI deployments from months to days. Users benefit by operationalising AI and ML data science projects faster, eliminating data silos, seamlessly scaling from pilot to production, and avoiding the costs and risks of moving data. Ezmeral ML Ops will also be available through GreenLake.
 
“The HPE Ezmeral software portfolio fuels data-driven digital transformation in the enterprise by modernising applications, unlocking insights and automating operations,” said Kumar Sreekanti, CTO at HPE. “Our software uniquely enables customers to eliminate lock-in and costly legacy licensing models, helping them to accelerate innovation and reduce costs, while ensuring enterprise-grade security. With over 8300 software engineers in HPE continually innovating across our edge to cloud portfolio and signature customer wins in every vertical, HPE Ezmeral software and HPE GreenLake cloud services will disrupt the industry by delivering an open, flexible, cloud experience everywhere.”
 
The Abu Dhabi Digital Authority (ADDA) has formed a partnership with HPE on a number of digitisation and data initiatives.
 
“The effective use of data is a cornerstone for any government to unlock its full potential,” said Abdulla Al Kendi, ADDA’s acting executive director of technology. “For this reason, the recent Covid-19 crisis has ushered in a new chapter to our collaboration with HPE. Using HPE Ezmeral ML Ops, ADDA is deploying leading-edge data science and AI and ML instrumentation to develop intelligent policies aimed at recovery and containment, preparedness and disease management and economic growth and revitalisation. We’re pleased with the performance of the HPE Ezmeral ML Ops software so far and are very supportive of the steps HPE is taking to deliver MLOps software through HPE GreenLake.”
 
A key component of the Ezmeral Container Platform is an HPE-contributed open source project, KubeDirector, which provides the ability to run non-cloud-native monolithic applications – such as complex, stateful, scale-out application clusters requiring persistent storage – on Kubernetes.
 
HPE’s acquisition in February 2020 of Scytale for cloud-native security underscores its commitment to the open source ecosystem, with on-going contributions to open source projects, including Spiffe and Spire.
 
Last month, CNCF announced that Spiffe and Spire have been promoted from sandbox to incubation-level hosted projects. This signifies the continued evolution and market adoption of the projects.
 
Since joining CNCF, the Spiffe and Spire projects have grown in popularity and have been deployed by companies such as Bloomberg, Bytedance, Pinterest, Square, Uber and Yahoo Japan. Spire has a thriving developer community, with a flow of commits and merged contributions from organisations such as Amazon, Bloomberg, Google, HPE, Pinterest, Square, TransferWise and Uber.
 
The Ezmeral brand name is a derivative of esmeralda, the Spanish word for emerald. Emeralds are believed to confer power and the ability to predict future events, strengthen intelligence, ease stress and enhance immunity. The transformation of raw emerald to a cut and polished stone to reveal something more beautiful and valuable is analogous to the digital transformation journey HPE says its customers are on.
 
Ezmeral Container Platform and Ezmeral ML Ops are available in beta as cloud services through GreenLake, with general availability scheduled for later in the year.