· Multi-cloud expansion to Alibaba and AWS GovCloud
· Network automation and SDN support for Cisco ACI
· Global search of all connected clouds and infrastructure
According 451 Research, the cloud-enabling technology market will approach $40 billion by 2020, growing at 13% CAGR[i]. While 59% of organizations have a majority of IT on-premises today, the balance is expected to swing off-premises in the next two years[ii]. “Transformation requires the right underpinning cloud platform,” says William Fellows VP of Research, 451 Research. “Unified offerings like Morpheus reduce tool sprawl and simplify provisioning across an increasingly diverse ecosystem of technologies and suppliers.”
The rapid shift to hybrid IT coupled with increasing pressure from development teams creates a challenge for resource constrained IT departments. Morpheus bridges the gap between digital business expectations and IT service delivery through a systematic approach to cloud optimization, governance, automation, and production operations. With these updates, enterprises, governments, and service providers can provide simple self-service app deployment faster than ever before.
“Customers often turn to us when other multi-cloud automation projects fail to deliver,” said Brad Parks, VP of Business Development, Morpheus Data. “With Morpheus, they find a breadth of third-party integrations and native capabilities that narrow tools from traditional vendors simply can’t match.”
Expanding cloud coverage for new geographies and markets
68% of organizations report they plan on using more than one cloud service, which can lead to tool sprawl if organizations do not standardize management[iii]. This multi-cloud challenge is amplified by the constantly changing cloud provider landscape. One example is Alibaba Cloud, the leading cloud provider in China, and one of the fastest growing public clouds in the world. With the new Morpheus integration into Alibaba, global organizations can standardize all public and private cloud operations to assure compliance and reduce cost.
Security and compliance is of particular importance to public sector organizations. AWS GovCloud is an isolated AWS region that allows U.S. government agencies and customers to safely move sensitive workloads into the cloud while addressing regulatory requirements. Now with support for AWS GovCloud, Morpheus customers can eliminate management silos that may have been associated with these specialized accounts.
For VMware customers and service providers who want to simplify multi-cloud orchestration and avoid tool lock-in, Morpheus has expanded support for vCloud Director and enhanced performance with VMware vSphere. These integrations enable forward-looking organizations to improve the ROI from existing VMware investments while providing an open path to cloud-native technologies such as containers and serverless computing.
Eliminating network provisioning headaches with SDN support
Morpheus already counts a number of Fortune 100 enterprises as customers and it’s clear from those discussions that network provisioning is a major obstacle in cloud automation. Extending self-service deployment to the network requires programmable fabrics such as Cisco ACI. For customers with large Cisco deployments, ACI offers a framework to automate workflows and secure application endpoints.
Unlike some cloud platforms that claim integrations but require significant script development, Morpheus integrations are built-in and available out-of-the box. Now, customers can inventory Cisco ACI configurations, create networks, bridge domains, and provision into new endpoint groups on the fly directly from the Morpheus console or API. Morpheus already provides this level of integration with Cisco UCS for composing bare metal servers.
“Automating infrastructure provisioning and making thousands of instances production ready required deep partnership with Morpheus Data which paid off with over 160x improvement in delivery speed” said Anish Abraham, Cloud Automation Architect at AstraZeneca. “The addition Cisco ACI on top of SaltStack, ServiceNow, and AI-based guidance has proved we made the right choice in unified orchestration for our enterprise cloud.”
The Morpheus networking module has also been enhanced with deeper third-party integration to improve enterprise agility. Updates include:
- Improved performance and syncing into Bluecat and Infoblox for IP management and DNS services.
- Openstack and Microsoft Hyper-V networking improvements including multi-network, static IP and IP pool support
- F5 load balancer integration now enables virtual servers, nodes, and pools to be created, edited, and deleted directly to save time.
Enhancing intelligent orchestration at scale with global search
The Morpheus unified orchestration platform brings together CloudOps and DevOps teams while providing a single source of visibility to prevent shadow IT and simplify management.
Today, Morpheus extends its vision for unified multi-cloud orchestration with a new global search capability which enables the entire control plane of connected clouds and infrastructure to be instantly accessed from a single interface. This new level of visibility provides rapid short-cut access to any element of a customer’s multi-cloud deployment which can simplify troubleshooting in complex deployments and give hours of productivity back to the business. Administrators can search by clouds, domains, groups, virtual images and hosts or by infrastructure integrations including load balancers and networks.
This latest update comes on the heels of the introduction of last year’s introduction of predictive analytics to help lower cloud costs by 30 percent or more. By applying machine learning to millions of data points across hybrid infrastructure customers can right-size virtual machine instances, apply intelligent power schedules and more.