Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has announced the general availability of the HPE Container Platform. First introduced in November 2019, the enterprise-grade container platform is designed to support both cloud-native and non-cloud-native applications using 100 percent open source Kubernetes – running on bare-metal or virtual machines (VMs), in the data center, on any public cloud, or at the edge.

In addition, HPE is introducing new professional services to ensure faster time-to-value and several new reference configurations for data-intensive application workloads such as AI, machine learning, deep learning (DL), data analytics, edge computing, and IoT, the company said.

Built on HPE’s recent acquisitions of BlueData and MapR, the HPE Container Platform features BlueData software as the container management control plane and the MapR distributed file system as the unified data fabric for persistent storage.

The HPE Container Platform is said to reduce cost and complexity by running containers on bare-metal, while providing the flexibility to deploy in VMs or cloud instances. This allows businesses to embrace a hybrid cloud or multi-cloud approach to deploying Kubernetes with enterprise-class security, performance, and reliability.

HPE is actively engaged in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Kubernetes community, with open source projects such as KubeDirector. A key component of the HPE Container Platform, KubeDirector provides the ability to run non-cloud-native monolithic applications (i.e., stateful applications with persistent storage) on Kubernetes.