The designs, one around HPE SimpliVity and the other a ProLiant/Nimble combination, run in the GKE environment, and will be available both through a standard reference architecture and through HPE’s GreenLake consumption-based as-a-service offering.
Today, at the Google Cloud Next event in San Francisco, Hewlett Packard Enterprise [HPE] and Google Cloud are announcing a global partnership that, out of the gate, will deliver two hybrid cloud solutions for Google Cloud’s Anthos, the rebranding of their Cloud Services platform that comes out of beta today. One is based on HPE SimpliVity hyperconverged infrastructure [HCI], and the other on HPE Nimble Storage with HPE ProLiant servers. Both have the Google Kubernetes Engine [GKE] environment on top. Both are also available as HPE Validated Designs, and as an HPE service available through the HPE GreenLake consumption-based offering.
“This our first partnership with Google,” said Paul Miller, VP Marketing, Software Defined and Cloud, at HPE. “We are introducing two validated designs for Googles GKE platform, one based on HPE SimpliVity, and the other based on a combination of HPE Nimble storage and HPE ProLiant servers. This will allow us to provide an appliance experience in the customer’s data centre. We will bring this into our GreenLake consumption as-a-service model as well.”
The HPE Validated Design for Anthos on HPE SimpliVity brings the simplicity of a hyperconverged solution to GKE, by allowing containers and VMs to share the same hardware and storage, without requiring entire servers to be devoted to GKE. It thus simplifies test/dev and hybrid cloud management for containerized applications hosted at the enterprise edge.
“This is validated for partners with the reference architecture,” Miller said. “Google will then drop the GKE environment on top to provide a true hybrid cloud containerized environment.”
The other reference architecture, HPE Validated Design for Anthos on HPE Nimble Storage with HPE ProLiant, provides a flexible architecture for storage-centric workloads that require independent scaling of compute and storage.
“This one is designed for storage-centric container environments, with say, two server nodes and eight storage nodes,” Miller noted. “Our Nimble/ProLiant design with GKE on top will bring HCI simplicity to a containerized environment. It also gives channel partners additional options. For example, they can have a ‘land and expand’ strategy, introducing SimpliVity, as well as providing a future path to containers.”
Miller emphasized that these solutions’ flexibility is a key part of their value, in their ability to bring the speed of flash to container environments along with uniform management across on-premises and public cloud.
“GKE runs in a VM, and through Google, customers will be able to deploy it in the Google public cloud, or on premise,” he said.
Miller pointed to the new partnership that HPE announced with Nutanix earlier in the day, and stressed the commonality that both announcements had in extending their routes to market and giving customers more choice.
“Our message to the market is that we are extending our as-a-service model with both Google containers and the Google Cloud, as well as with Nutanix, which we also announced today,” he said. “Most customers have a mix of hypervisors and containers. These new partnerships allow our partners to expand the number of conversations they can have. They will simplify the ability to get into a hybrid containerized environment.”
