Hitachi Vantara announces enhancements to their cloud vision, with new capabilities around Kubernetes in a multi-cloud environment through their HEC Container Platform.

SAN DIEGO – Hitachi Vantara has ramped up their managed cloud offerings with some significant announcements to their Hitachi Enterprise Cloud  [HEC] Container Platform. With the support of strategic partners like Aqua Security and Mesosphere, they have upgraded their Kubernetes management capabilities, with the capacity for one-click deployments within a multi-cloud management strategy. The announcement was made at the Hitachi NEXT event here.

“What we have created for you is a cloud experience in a private or hybrid cloud model that gives you the operational experience of a cloud and utility model,” Don Kamer, Director of Cloud Solutions Development at Hitachi Vantara, and the lead architect on the project, told a breakout session for customers and partners at NEXT. “That was the starting point of our thinking. We also wanted multiple orchestrators, a one-click native Kubernetes install, and to be able to use it in a true multi-tenanted scenario to give tenants their own endpoints for Kubernetes.”

Being able to provide this kind of container-specific solution that provides complete visibility, a better management experience, and a fully secure environment became a top priority for Hitachi Vantara, as enterprises shift more development into cloud-native application environments with containers.

“The issue today is creating applications that can take advantage of billions of end points with containerized microservices that can scale,” said Rob Jones, Cloud Services Strategist EMEA, at Hitachi Vantara. “That involves things like Amazon recommendations, traffic lights for a city, and autonomous car data, and the old architectures just can’t keep up with the scale of this consumption model.”

Developers have also been demanding a self-service Kubernetes.

“They don’t want to be locked into one cloud provider,” Jones said. “They also want open source, they want to be able to scale across clusters, and they don’t want science projects that don’t add value.”

The enhancements to the HEC platform facilitate this,

“From a Hitachi perspective, the answer was to provide an enterprise class container platform that is like the public cloud, with a set of data services and DevOps tools that can be selected from a catalogue –  a one-click Kubernetes to provide automated Kubernetes deployments,” Jones said.

Jones emphasizes that doing this through HEC provides the advantages of a solution being based on a platform, rather than simply providing a container service.

“There has been a focus in the industry on container services, which is really just container orchestration,” he said. “Kubernetes here is one portion of a platform, which gives everything that a service provides plus a catalogue of services already embedded in the platform, plus full security, That’s the stack that will support an enterprise looking to deploy these massive data drive applications.

“Our strategy here, around Hitachi Enterprise Cloud, is to provide a flexible private and hybrid cloud with a similar experience as the public cloud providers, including utility-based pricing, but with SLAs that enterprises expect from on-prem,” Jones stressed.

Strategic vendor partners play a critical role in the solution.

“We embed security from Aqua Security within the platform for container isolation and network isolation across the cluster,” Jones said. Aqua Security brings run-time protection, encryption, vulnerability scanning and micro-segmentation to the HEC platform.

“Our partnership with Mesosphere provides us with over 120 preconfigured applications, to help us burst out to the public cloud,” Jones added, noting that this includes data services like Spark, Cassandra and Kafka. “Customers can also provide their own applications within that catalogue.

“We see two primary use cases for this – a data services platform and a DevOps platform,” Jones said. “The DevOps platform has preconfigured application tools that will be already be part of most DevOps pipelines today. We just make consuming them a lot easier.”

Jones also stressed that the solution is a flexible one.

“The message from us is that Kubernetes is the orchestrator for today and that we believe that it will be the most popular for years to come – but that you aren’t tied to that,” he said. “If something else comes around in the next year or two, you will be able to move to that.”

The enhanced HEC Container Platform is available now.