Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) added some new bling to its Ezmeral software portfolio to further bolster its hybrid cloud strategy that targets rivals VMware and IBM/Red Hat.

The most significant update is to the Ezmeral Data Fabric, which is now available as a standalone offering in addition to an embedded integration inside the HPE Ezmeral Container Platform.

HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric is a persistent container storage and shared global storage. This provides the same capabilities as native Kubernetes storage but can run as a workload on a Kubernetes cluster for easier installation, upgrading, and scaling. This tackles issues surrounding the ability to deploy stateful applications on containers with access to shared data.

Anant Chintamaneni, VP and GM of HPE Ezmeral products, said this round of updates makes it easier for customers to implement both hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

“The HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric can be installed in more than one cloud and seamlessly connect to an on-prem environment, while providing a single view of the data,” he added. “This is why we say that Ezmeral provides an edge-to-cloud platform offering organizations frictionless access to data anywhere, on-premises or off.”

Organizations are struggling to solve the data logistics challenges from edge to cloud for data intensive applications, data storage environments, and artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) workflows. To create frictionless access to data, with a holistic view of all the data on a continuous basis, Chintamaneni said organizations need to employ an industrialized approach to data science to support many users, tools, and steps to lower the risk for data engineers, data operations, and data scientists who all need access to the same data and tools they prefer, all in one control plane for the full team.

HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric enables users to control the speed of data operations. “Data engineers in particular find this to be of huge value to make their work easier in enabling the data scientists,” Chintamaneni said. “It ensures the right data is delivered to the right people at the right time.”

Ezmeral acts as HPE's infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) layers, allowing customers to deploy and manage containerized applications across any infrastructure: bare metal, VMs, public and private clouds, and on HPE and non-HPE hardware. Those customers can run cloud-native or non-cloud-native applications in containers without refactoring them and for customers to manage multiple Kubernetes clusters with a unified control plane.

As part of today’s announcement, the vendor also launched a new HPE Ezmeral Technology Ecosystem program to open the door for customers to tap into independent software vendors (ISVs) such as Dataiku, MinIO, H2O.AI, Rapt.AI, Run:AI, Sysdig, and Unravel to create more streamlined analytics environments. Customers can find ISVs and open source projects such as Apache Spark and Tensorflow in the marketplace.

Ezmeral is HPE’s answer to similar Kubernetes-focused platforms like VMware’s Tanzu and Red Hat’s OpenShift Kubernetes product.  Although the Kubernetes-platform space race is still in its very early stages, HPE has a couple of aces up its sleeve.

“HPE Ezmeral uniquely harnesses the power of a few critical elements in a way no other player has done, including modern Kubernetes containerization for scalable elasticity and agility with HPE’s differentiated IP, enabling customers to import their Kubernetes clusters so that HPE Ezmeral becomes their container orchestration control plane for other [Kubernetes] clusters,” Chintamaneni said.

It also utilizes KubeDirector to onboard ISV solutions that have not yet been containerized by the vendors. Chintamaneni called this a “unique value add” from HPE as it sits on top of 100% open-source Kubernetes that he said no one else provides. “It allows organizations to create a unified container environment out of their many silos of container clusters.”