“Application development is migrating to containers, and Kubernetes is the de facto standard for container orchestration,” said Kumar Sreekanti, senior vice president and chief technology officer of Hybrid IT at HPE. “We’re combining our expertise and intellectual property from recent acquisitions together with open source Kubernetes to deliver an unmatched enterprise-class container platform. Our container-first approach will provide enterprises with a faster and lower cost path to application modernization, optimized for bare-metal and extensible to any infrastructure from edge to cloud.”

Enterprise organizations today recognize that in order to transform and compete in their industry, they need to innovate faster and modernize their applications. To increase the velocity of new application development and drive digital innovation, they’re using containers and Kubernetes to build cloud-native applications with a microservices architecture. Industry analyst research validates this rapid growth for container adoption in the enterprise:

• Gartner estimates that more than 75 percent of global organizations will be running containerized applications in production by 2022, up from less than 30 percent today1
• IDC research shows that 55 percent of large U.S. enterprises have standardized on Kubernetes for container orchestration2
• A recent 451 Research survey indicates that 95 percent of new applications will use containers3

As these organizations extend their use of containers and Kubernetes beyond development and testing to production environments, they need to address key considerations including security, multi-cluster management and load balancing. New use cases are emerging for edge computing, databases, and more. In addition, a significant portion of their enterprise applications and systems are not cloud-native – these traditional monolithic applications are costly to maintain and many of them would benefit from containerization. But re-architecting or refactoring existing applications as cloud-native is time-consuming and expensive. And these applications have requirements that remain challenging with Kubernetes, such as root filesystem persistence and migration.

The HPE Container Platform is a turnkey solution that uniquely addresses these challenges, with BlueData software as the control plane for container management, the MapR distributed file system for persistent data with containers, and Kubernetes for container orchestration. This breakthrough approach extends the benefits of containers beyond cloud-native microservices-architected applications, providing the ability to containerize non cloud-native monolithic applications with persistent data storage.