Today, Morpheus Data rolled out enhancements to its next-gen multi-cloud management platform (CMP) in support of hybrid IT projects at large enterprises and service providers.

Having recently received a Best of VMworld Award for Agile Operations and Automation and achieving the top vendor ranking on WhatMatrix.com for CMP, this announcement reinforces Morpheus' applicability for commercial platforms like VMware as well as open source and cloud-native frameworks.

[ Watch the VMblog video interview with Morpheus Data at VMworld 2018 ]

News highlights include:

• Expanded OpenStack support
• Automation with AWS CloudFormation
• Dell Technologies storage and cloud integration

According to 451 Research, IT organizations must be redefined for the age of DevOps and hybrid cloud. "Every company needs to raise its software IQ to remain relevant," says William Fellows VP of Research, 451 research. "But skill gaps in cloud platforms like AWS and OpenStack could make or break digital transformation initiatives." (Download the 451 Research CMP Market Map)

The Morpheus next-generation CMP bridges this gap by simplifying hybrid IT management across clouds, assuring compliance, and providing developers resources on demand. "Digital transformation happens at the intersection of DevOps and Cloud which is putting extreme pressure on IT," said Brad Parks, VP of Business Development, Morpheus Data. "Morpheus addresses the cloud complexity crisis while at the same time unleashing developer productivity."

Simplifying orchestration of OpenStack based clouds

A recent Forrester report indicates that more than 50 of the Fortune 100 use OpenStack today and a third of global enterprise infrastructure decision makers see expanding the use of open source as a critical or high priority. However, 48% of OpenStack users say they also interact with other cloud platforms.²

Morpheus gives hybrid IT organizations the ability to take advantage of open source agility and manage multi-cloud environments which include OpenStack without adding incremental complexity. With the latest software release Morpheus is simplifying OpenStack management by enabling customers to directly orchestrate actions from the Morpheus interface, enabling them to:

• Boost agility by creating OpenStack Octavia load balancers and assigning to VMs for dynamic scaling as application needs change
• Streamline software-defined network management by creating and attaching OpenStack Neutron SDNs and domain name assignments
• Simplify management by connecting directly from the Morpheus UI to instances running within OpenStack via hypervisor console access

Accelerating DevOps teams with AWS infrastructure-as-code

According to the 2018 State of DevOps report, ‘Elite' performing organizations are able to go from code commit to a fully provisioned production instance in less than an hour.³ That level of speed requires a programmatic approach to end-to-end provisioning, often referred to as infrastructure-as-code (IaC).

Morpheus has long met this requirement with powerful infrastructure-as-code (IaC) application blueprints which are completely platform and cloud agnostic. These templates blend the power of declarative JSON/YAML scripting with an intuitive graphical interface (GUI) designed for everyday administrators trying to support continuous integration and delivery processes (CI/CD).

With today's announcement, Morpheus now supports execution of application blueprints using native AWS CloudFormation in addition to existing support for HashiCorp Terraform, Microsoft ARM, and native Morpheus templates. With support for a full suite of IaC template languages, Morpheus lets IT operations teams to enforce governance and standardize provisioning processes while still letting DevOps teams increase agility with their toolchain of choice.

Enabling real-time storage provisioning for private clouds

According to the 451 Research 2018 Voice of the Enterprise report, 47 percent of respondents expect to deploy cloud-based data protection in the next two years and 34% say the same for cloud archiving.⁴ To avoid storage silos, teams need to incorporate storage into cloud-first management and automation projects.

To address this demand, Morpheus worked with Dell EMC to integrate Isilon and ECS for file and object storage as well as Avamar data protection into its multi-cloud management platform. Morpheus has also integrated Virtustream, the cloud services business of Dell Technologies, enabling customers to consolidate management of public, private, and managed cloud platforms.

These new integrations, together with connectivity into over 20 other public and private cloud platforms will enable DevOps teams to instantly deploy new application stacks to any cloud, attach to unstructured data repositories, and establish data protection as part of a single workflow.