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August 25, 2018

Morpheus Data Helps Enterprises Bridge the Agility Gap with End-to-End Orchestration of Hybrid IT on Virtually Any Cloud and Platform

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Today, Morpheus Data announced major updates to its next generation cloud management platform (CMP) which will help IT Operations teams orchestrate software defined networks, multi-cloud high availability, and leading configuration management tools.

By bringing together over 75 third-party tools under a single out-of-the-box automation engine, Morpheus lets IT quickly provide self-service provisioning to developers and accelerate application deployments by 150x or more.

New integrations enable customers to:

  • Simplify networking with VMware NSX and phpIPAM
  • Assure service levels with the Zerto IT Resilience Platform
  • Scale IT automation with Ansible Tower and Ansible Vault

According to 451 Research, top factors influencing customers choice of CMP include security, tool integration, support for hybrid architecture, and orchestration of all stack layers. "Businesses competing in the digital economy must transform or die," says William Fellows, VP of Research, 451 Research. "The paradox is that the more important the role of infrastructure, the more important that it is to shield users from having to directly interact with it - that's why cloud management and DevOps have become so critical." (Download the 451 Research Cloud Management Market Map)

The Morpheus multi-cloud management platform insulates developers from the complexities of app deployment and simplifies automation of complex workflows for IT operations. "Keeping up with new technologies is virtually impossible for organizations already drowning in technical debt," said Brad Parks, VP of Business Development, Morpheus Data. "Our API integration leadership means customers can focus more on service delivery and less on maintaining brittle DIY automation projects."

Accelerate network provisioning in software-defined datacenters

As enterprises and service providers seek to quickly deliver new services, they are driving the adoption of software-defined networks (SDN) at 39% CAGR between 2017 and 2023i. SDNs enable IT to make networking changes on the fly, which is critical when dealing with unpredictable demand.

However, networking is just one of many components that must be automated to instantly respond to service requests. This is why Morpheus Data added SDN orchestration as part of its end-to-end self-service provisioning platform earlier this year starting with Cisco ACI.

Today's announcement extends SDN support to VMware NSX to enable seamless orchestration of virtual cloud networks and automation of NSX alongside other key networking tasks such as IP Address Management, DNS, and more. With just a few mouse clicks, customers can add their NSX Manager to the Morpheus CMP; once added, Morpheus will synchronize Transport Zones, Logical Switches, and Edge Gateways. Customers can also create NSX services directly from Morpheus, eliminating the need to wait on networking teams. The NSX integration builds on existing VMware support in Morpheus for vSphere and vCloud Director.

With this release, Morpheus has also added phpIPAM to its list of third-party IP address management integrations which already includes Infoblox and Bluecat. Once pointed at the IPAM API server, Morpheus ingests all IP pool and DNS zone details. Morpheus can automatically assign IP addresses and create DNS records at provisioning time plus provide cleanup upon teardown without users having to go into a different interface.

Assure SLAs by modernizing multi-cloud provisioning AND protection

Storage and data management is a core element of digital transformation initiatives, however legacy approaches to storage simply don't have the ability to support multi-cloud automation required by today's agile enterprises.

Morpheus provides the ability to set data protection policies across clouds with cloud-native backup integration as well as support for Veeam and Commvault. With the newest release, Morpheus has partnered with Zerto to enable real-time establishment of continuous data protection policies that leverage the Zerto IT Resilience Platform.

"Our vision is to eliminate silos associated with legacy backup and enable protection of any app on any cloud to ensure resilience in IT operations," said Rob Strechay, SVP of Product, Zerto. "The integration into Morpheus enables our combined multi-cloud customers to modernize protection as they modernize provisioning."

In addition to data protection updates, the latest Morpheus release includes enhanced Object Storage and CIFS/NFS connectivity to take advantage of lower cost and more scalable repositories for unstructured data. Customers can now create, browse, upload, download and delete files, integrate object storage into backup and archive services, include object stores as part of application blueprints, and move data between cloud services.

Standardize orchestration across configuration services and clouds

In a properly managed DevOps organization, developers have self-service access to deploy application components in a consistent way in all phases of the pipeline and all changes go through configuration management (CM), which allows organizations to assure proper state and enforce change control policy.

Morpheus assures IT is able to use the right tool for the right job. Customers can use configuration management tools such as Chef, SaltStack, Ansible, or Puppet to help assure configuration state for software components while using Morpheus to provide fine grained role-based access around cloud provisioning, networking configuration, monitoring, scaling, and other application lifecycle tasks.

With the most recent release, Morpheus has extended its Ansible integration to include Ansible Tower. The integration enables Morpheus to inventory Tower via API to retrieve playbooks, variables, and host information as well as support the initiation of execution requests that include Ansible Vault credentials. By combining Ansible with Morpheus customers can eliminate the brittleness that comes from over-reliance on configuration management as the sole approach to automation.

For more information, visit www.morpheusdata.com 

David Marshall

David Marshall has been involved in the technology industry for over 19 years, and he's been working with virtualization software since 1999. He was able to become an industry expert in virtualization by becoming a pioneer in that field - one of the few people in the industry allowed to work with Alpha stage server virtualization software from industry leaders: VMware (ESX Server), Connectix and Microsoft (Virtual Server).

Through the years, he has invented, marketed and helped launch a number of successful virtualization software companies and products. David holds a BS degree in Finance, an Information Technology Certification, and a number of vendor certifications from Microsoft, CompTia and others. He's also co-authored two published books: "VMware ESX Essentials in the Virtual Data Center" and "Advanced Server Virtualization: VMware and Microsoft Platforms in the Virtual Data Center" and acted as technical editor for two popular Virtualization "For Dummies" books. With his remaining spare time, David founded and operates one of the oldest independent virtualization news blogs, VMblog.com. And co-founded CloudCow.com, a publication dedicated to Cloud Computing. Starting in 2009 and continuing all the way to 2016, David has been honored with the vExpert distinction by VMware for his virtualization evangelism.