HPE is to sell the HPE Ezemeral Data Fabric on a standalone basis and it has opened a marketplace for cloud-native software running on this AI-ML focused service.

Ezmeral Data Fabric was previously known as the MapR Data Platform for data lakes. It is an exabyte-scale, repository for streaming and file data, a real-time database, a global namespace, and integrations with Hadoop, Spark, and Apache Drill for analytics and other applications.

HPE said enterprise customers can use the service to create a unified data repository for data scientists, developers, and IT to access and use, with control of how it is used and shared. The company envisages AI and ML processing will take place across the IT spectrum, from edge sites and data centres through to the public clouds, with containerised apps processing data from a global repository.

The data is accessed via several protocols: HDFS, Posix, NFS, and S3, and can be tiered automatically to hot, warm and cold stores across hybrid cloud environments.

Kumar Sreekanti, HPE CTO and head of software, was quoted in a statement: “The separate HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric data store and new HPE Ezmeral Marketplace provide enterprises with the environment of their choice, and with visibility and governance across all enterprise applications and data through an open, flexible, cloud experience everywhere.”

HPE released Ezmeral, a software framework for containerised apps, in June 2020. At launch, there were two components: the Ezmeral Container Platform and Ezmeral ML Ops. Ezmeral was added to the GreenLake subscription service earlier this month. Now we have the separated-out Ezmeral Data Fabric, Ezmeral ML Ops, an Ezmeral Technology Ecosystem program and the Ezmeral Marketplace.

Vendors on the new marketplace are validated via the new Ezmeral Technology Ecosystem. Dataiku, MinIO, H2O.AI, Rapt.AI, Run:AI, Sysdig, and Unravel have already passed muster. In addition, Apache Spark,  Tensorflow, Gitlab, and Elastic Stack are available on the marketplace.

Ezmeral Data Fabric is available as a software license subscription to run on any infrastructure or public cloud. The Ezmeral Container Platform and Ezmeral ML Ops are available as cloud services through GreenLake now, and HPE plans to offer the Ezmeral Data Fabric as a GreenLake service in the future.

Data fabric softener

With enterprise adoption of containerisation poised to go mainstream, multiple vendors have developed software management products to abstract the complexities of Kubernetes-orchestration of containers.

HPE’s Ezmeral competitors include VMware Tanzu, Red Hat OpenShift, Dell Karavi, to an extent, Diamanti, the Hitachi Vantara Kubernetes Service, MayaData’s Kubera, NetApp Astra, and Pure Storage Portworx.

Startups like Diamanti and MayaData see a great opportunity to make enterprise inroads with their Kubernetes management magic carpets. Incumbents like HPE see an opportunity to extend existing customer wallet share and a necessity to deny wannabe startups any headroom.

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Today, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced its acquisition of MapR business assets. MapR began as a company focused on providing a cloud data platform. They extended their message into machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI), claiming to be good support for data sources needed in those arenas. In addition to the cloud, they focused on a container message for scalability. They had some early backing, but that backing wall pulled earlier this year.

Phil Davis, president, Hybrid IT, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, said in the press release, “MapR’s enterprise-grade file system and cloud-native storage services complement HPE’s BlueData container platform strategy and will allow us to provide a unique value proposition for customers. We are pleased to welcome MapR’s world-class team to the HPE family.”

The press release also focused on the partners in the AI/ML and analytics markets more than it did on the technologies.

What’s interesting to note is that no price was announced for the acquisition. In addition, the stated purpose of working with BlueData, another acquisition focusing on container-based software for AI/ML should make folks wonder about the purpose and benefit of the acquisition. What we have is a second acquisition in the same space, but the MapR one is of a company from with the backers withdrew funding. It is reasonable to assume that HPE acquired it for the connections into the market and not for the technology. Could they have just paid for the lead list and for the partner relations?

From a non-financial evaluation, the larger companies are continuing the fast follower strategy mentioned in my previous article, but MapR didn’t have the presence that OpenAI had, pre-acquisition. I’m sure HPE didn’t pay as much as Microsoft did, but there is still a lot left unanswered in the press release and related material. That means there is no way to evaluate what kind of sense the acquisition makes.

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