HPE partners with Portworx for easier Kubernetes deployment

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has partnered with Kubernetes container vendor Portworx to provide a reference configuration for enterprises to launch stateful container workloads on Kubernetes.

Containers are a lightweight form of virtualization, where just what is needed is loaded rather than the full operating system like in a virtualized environment. Docker was the first with containers, but it has been steamrolled by Kubernetes, which was developed by Google. Google just had way more resources to bring to bear than Docker, a startup that has relied on venture funding.

One of the big changes as containers have evolved is adopting the stateful condition. Initially they were stateless, meaning the data was erased from memory when the container was shut down at the completion of its workload. Stateful applications, on the other hand, are services that require retention of data, usually through a connection to a back-end database so they have persistent storage.

HPE’s and Portworx’s new solution

This new solution pairs HPE’s Synergy composable system with Portworx’s PX-Enterprise cloud-native storage platform to deploy a scale-out container platform on bare metal. One of Portworx’s target markets is DevOps teams, and developers can deploy a container in 30 minutes that is elastic and scalable to many nodes.

“Running enterprise container workloads at scale requires compute and storage that are highly flexible, scalable and available,” said McLeod Glass, vice president of production management at HPE, in a statement. “Together Portworx and HPE deliver a fully integrated cloud-native storage layer on top of HPE Synergy’s composable infrastructure, enabling scalable data and compute services for containers on a Kubernetes cluster. This will vastly simplify the customer’s ability to deliver stateful container services through deployment automation and running native container storage on HPE’s composable systems.”

What are HPE Synergy and Portworx PX-Enterprise?

Both products are pretty new. HPE introduced Synergy in December 2015, while Portworx first introduced PX-Enterprise product in June 2016. Synergy is actually a hardware platform, what HPE calls “composable” hardware that combines compute, storage, and network equipment in one chassis, along with management software that can quickly configure the hardware needed to run an application.

Synergy stores configurations for particular applications as templates and deploys them through an app called Composer. The hardware is configured for the app and the OS images are deployed, all without any human intervention.

PX-Enterprise is an easy-to-deploy container data services that provide persistence, replication, snapshots, encryption, and secure distributed storage for containers. It works both on premises and in the cloud and spans both.

Containers are becoming a hot commodity, and Kubernetes has the lead. According to a Portworx Annual Container Adoption survey of 491 IT professionals, 43 percent said they use Kubernetes, with 32 percent using it as their primary orchestration tool. Docker Swarm was a distant second at 30 percent. The survey was nearly a year ago, however, and things have likely changed.