HPE, Mesosphere Tighten Integration

Mesosphere and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) have tightened their relationship by integrating their respective management platforms. At the recent Discover 2017 conference hosted by HPE, the two companies announced that they have integrated Mesosphere’s Data Center Operating System (DCOS) with HPE’s Synergy and OneView management platforms.

Peter Guagenti, chief marketing officer for Mesosphere, says the goal is to give customers multiple paths to unifying the underlying compute and storage fabric using Mesos cluster and the Marathon container orchestration engine. IT organizations that have standardized on HPE Synergy or HPE OneView can now invoke DC/OS platform that Mesosphere has crafted on top of Mesos and Marathon. Conversely, Guagenti says IT organizations that have standardized on DC/OS will also be able to extend their reach out to software-defined infrastructure using application programming interfaces (APIs) expose by HPE.

Guagenti says this latest integration effort will help fuel a reseller agreement under which the two companies’ partners can resell each other products and services. HPE already has an equity position in Mesosphere.

As container technologies evolve, Guagenti says IT organizations should expect to see Mesosphere extend the scope and reach of DC/OS. Guagenti notes that some IT organizations have already deployed DC/OS alongside technologies from Docker Inc. and, as an open-source project, integrating Kubernetes with DC/OS is equally feasible.

Regardless of what technologies get implemented, Guagenti notes container platforms are being implemented to both foster hybrid cloud computing and reduce the risk of being locked into a single cloud platform. At the same time, more compute resources are being pushed to the edge in the form of 5G networks and internet of things (IoT) applications. As that trend evolves, IT organizations will look to platforms that make it easier to federate computing between public clouds, local data centers and the network edge in the most elastic way possible, he says.

Of course, HPE isn’t the only provider of IT infrastructure Mesosphere is allied with. The company also struck an alliance with Dell EMC last month. But given the financial relationship with HPE, it’s clear the two companies are working closely at an engineering level. That said, HPE also has a relationship with Docker Inc. and supports Kubernetes as an extension of the HPE Synergy platform for managing software-defined infrastructure.

Naturally, it’s too early to say which of any of those three container platforms might supplant the others. HPE is betting on multiple container platforms as part of a composable infrastructure strategy designed to entice IT organizations to upgrade to more advanced software-defined infrastructure (SDI) platforms. The issue HPE is trying to address is the rate at which application workloads have been moving into the public cloud. More application workloads today still run on-premises. But to keep them there, HPE needs to make it much easier to deploy and manage local servers and storage in addition to more flexible licensing terms. Partnering and investing in Mesosphere is obviously becoming a significant element of that HPE strategy.

Mike Vizard

Mike Vizard is a seasoned IT journalist with over 25 years of experience. He also contributed to IT Business Edge, Channel Insider, Baseline and a variety of other IT titles. Previously, Vizard was the editorial director for Ziff-Davis Enterprise as well as Editor-in-Chief for CRN and InfoWorld.

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