The News: Morpheus Data presented their solution for multi-cloud platform choice at Cloud Field Day 20. Morpheus also showed some details of a forthcoming hyperconverged infrastructure platform developed in-house. View all the Morpheus Data presentations here.
Morpheus Unified Management for Multi-Cloud Platform Choice
Analyst Take: How do you achieve efficient infrastructure management in a multi-cloud world? Morpheus provides a multi-cloud management platform to enable self-service resource deployment within corporate governance requirements. A unified manager of hybrid clouds and an abstraction layer that allows deploying and managing resources with multi-cloud platform choice. Morpheus helps large enterprises struggling to handle the diversity of application requirements on multiple public clouds and on-premises on multiple platforms. Morpheus wants to hide the common complexity of IT and allow more time to be spent on activities that differentiate each business.
Abstraction for All Your Clouds
The Morpheus user interface looks like a modern cloud platform, a familiar place for many IT professionals. Rather than showing the compute locations from only one public cloud, Morpheus can show multiple AWS and Azure locations in a single portal, along with on-premises virtualization clusters. The interface does not simply provide a lowest-common-denominator interface; the full features of each platform are available through the Morpheus console to allow for a multi-cloud platform choice.
Governance for All Your Clouds
One reason companies may limit themselves to a single public cloud is the difficulty of maintaining management control and compliance of resources across multiple public clouds. Morpheus provides a unified location for governance with multi-cloud platform choice. Authentication, such as Active Directory and MFA providers, is linked into Morpheus, where groups have policies applied. The policies apply across all enrolled resources, public cloud, and on-premises, and groups might be linked to business units, projects, or specific compliance requirements. With corporate governance abstracted by Morpheus, multi-cloud platform choice is easier to offer to business units and application owners.
Morpheus Hyperconverged
An addition to the platform, currently in public beta, is the in-house developed HCI platform, based on KVM, CEPH, and Open vSwitch, called MVM. The MVM platform already includes VM high availability, live migration, and cluster resource scheduling. The HCI components are deployed onto a physical server with Ubuntu already installed, and then all management is through the Morpheus platform. Adding HCI to Morpheus means that customers don’t need to separately manage the deployment and configuration of the underlying virtualization platform, increasing multi-cloud platform choice. I expect the cost increases for vSphere licensing will be behind customers asking Morpheus to provide another option. I hope Morpheus will work on bare-metal deployment for MVM rather than starting from a deployed Linux server.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
Other Insights from The Futurum Group:
Aviatrix and Megaport Join Forces to Simplify and Secure Hybrid and Multicloud Networking
Synadia Raises Funding to Meet Multi-Cloud and Edge Computing Demand
Trusted Data: The Difference Maker – Six Five – On the Road with Cloudera
Author Information
Alastair has made a twenty-year career out of helping people understand complex IT infrastructure and how to build solutions that fulfil business needs. Much of his career has included teaching official training courses for vendors, including HPE, VMware, and AWS. Alastair has written hundreds of analyst articles and papers exploring products and topics around on-premises infrastructure and virtualization and getting the most out of public cloud and hybrid infrastructure. Alastair has also been involved in community-driven, practitioner-led education through the vBrownBag podcast and the vBrownBag TechTalks.
