Hewlett Packard Enterprise is partnering with Mesosphere to offer a reference architecture to provide persistent containers with 3PAR all-flash storage.
The new product SKUs are the first manifestation of HPE's February distribution agreement with the container software vendor. The open source Enterprise Datacenter Operating System (Mesosphere Enterprise DC/OS) orchestration tool handles large-scale deployments with Docker and other container runtimes.
The recommended configuration combines HPE BladeSystem compute infrastructure, HPE FlexFabric 10 Gigabit SAN switches and HPE 3PAR StoreServ 8200 all-flash arrays.
The BladeSystem enclosure contains four HPE ProLiant BL460c Gen8 server blades: one Mesos node and three agent nodes for Docker targets. The 3PAR all-flash nodes bundle 12 480 GB MLC NAND solid-state drives and two QLogic dual-port converged network adapters.
Vish Mulchand, senior director of product management and marketing at HPE Storage, said Mesosphere allows customers to develop cloud-native applications using composable infrastructure.
"You need different data services once you put a container in production," Mulchand said. "Mesosphere brings a very important orchestration element. We give you the infrastructure to develop on one kind of storage and move the container to production on HPE flash storage with encryption."
We give you the infrastructure to develop on one kind of storage and move the container to production on HPE flash storage with encryption.
Vish Mulchandsenior director of product management and marketing, HPE Storage
Composable infrastructure is a DevOps term to describe a framework for treating storage, compute and networking as resources. The framework pools those logical resources to eliminate the need to configure hardware individually for applications. HPE is at the forefront of pushing the term composable infrastructure.
Mesosphere Enterprise DC/OS is built on top of the Apache Mesos framework. HPE is integrating Enterprise DC/OS in its stack via a native Docker plug-in it introduced in 2016.
Mesosphere uses the API to automatically create container volumes and tear them down as required. The scheduler instantiates a data volume and maps it to an iSCSI host, allowing containers to consume persistent 3PAR all-flash capacity.
Mesosphere protects data in containers using native 3PAR array-based snapshots.
Russ Fellows, a senior partner and analyst at Evaluator Group in Boulder, Colo., said combining Mesosphere and 3PAR all-flash gives customers a fully supported platform to move containers into production.
"Two years ago, containers were just a toy for DevOps people. But people in production want something that's been tested and works," Fellows said. "This starts to move the needle a bit in that direction. It uses the scripting interfaces, but it's tested for production."
