HPE acquired Morpheus Data in August of last year in a bid to bolster multicloud management. Nine months later, that acquisition has spawned new capabilities as part of the integrated HPE Morpheus software portfolio, aimed at alleviating the challenges of managing hybrid environments.
“Enterprises are under tremendous pressure from all sides with cloud sprawl, technical debt and astronomical virtualization costs all hindering their ability to invest in and adopt AI,” said Cheri Williams, senior vice president and general manager of Private Cloud and Flex Solutions at HPE, during a press briefing. “It’s simply not sustainable, and it is pushing enterprises to rethink everything – public, private and what they need from both in a hybrid ecosystem.”
Key announcements at a glance:
- HPE Morpheus VM Essentials: A hypervisor solution that aims to reduce virtualization licensing costs.
- HPE Morpheus Enterprise: A unified cloud management platform that enables management of any workload across any cloud environment.
- Enhanced Private Cloud Business Edition: Now integrates with HPE Morpheus software for both data center and edge deployments, offering a claimed 2.5x lower TCO.
- New storage guarantees: Zero data loss, cyber resiliency, and energy consumption guarantees for HPE Alletra Storage MP customers.
- Entry-Llevel StoreOnce appliances: New HPE StoreOnce 3720 and 3760 models for SMBs and remote offices with 67% higher density and 29% lower power consumption.
Unified cloud management with Morpheus Software
When HPE acquired Morpheus, the promise was that it would bring more cloud management capabilities. That’s what the new HPE Morpheus Enterprise offering provides. It enables users to manage virtual machine (VM), container or bare metal workloads for private or public cloud deployment.
“This is for hybrid cloud management,” said Rajeev Bhardwaj, vice president and chief product officer for Private Cloud and Flex Solutions, during the press briefing. “What it essentially delivers to our customers is the flexibility to manage any workload on any cloud.”
The software provides a self-service, public cloud-like experience, Bhardwaj said. It integrates governance, policy-based cost controls as well as cloud spend management alongside chargeback capabilities. In addition, the system is designed as an open, extensible platform that allows customers to integrate third-party services and develop custom tooling.
What do you get when combining Morpheus with Aruba?
As part of the extensible platform message that HPE is promoting with Morpheus, it’s also working in some capabilities from the broader HPE portfolio.
One integration is with HPE Aruba for networking microsegmentation. Bhardwaj noted that a lot of HPE Morpheus users are looking for microsegmentation in order to make sure that the traffic between two virtual machines on a server is secure.
“The traditional approach of doing that is on the hypervisor, but that costs cycles on the hypervisor,” Bhardwaj said. “Frankly, the way that’s being delivered today, customers have to pay extra cost on the server.”
With the HPE Aruba plugin that now works with HPE Morpheus, the microsegmentation capability can be enabled at the switch level. Bhardwaj said that by doing the microsegmentation in the switch and not the hypervisor, costs can be lowered and performance can be increased.
The integration brings additional capabilities, including the ability to support VPN and network address translation (NAT) in an integrated way between the switch and the hypervisor.
VMware isn’t the only hypervisor supported by HPE
The HPE Morpheus VM Essentials Hypervisor is another new element in the HPE cloud portfolio. The hypervisor is now being integrated into HPE’s private cloud offerings for both data center as well as edge deployments.
“Customers have the flexibility to deploy VMware, and also they have the flexibility now to deploy our hypervisor,” Bhardwaj said. “They can deploy them in parallel managed by our HPE Morpheus cloud management platform, giving customers the flexibility to pick the right platform based on the needs of the workloads.”
HPE’s answer to virtualization cost crisis
Another significant aspect of HPE’s announcement addresses the dramatic rise in virtualization licensing costs that many enterprises have faced following Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware.
To help deal with that challenge, HPE Morpheus VM Essentials Hypervisor is being priced on a per-socket, rather than a per-core basis, which HPE claims will lower licensing costs by 90%.
Beyond licensing savings, the company’s Private Cloud Business Edition delivers additional cost benefits through its disaggregated architecture, which allows independent scaling of compute and storage resources, reducing both acquisition costs and operational overhead.
Enhanced cyber resilience through advanced storage guarantees
HPE is bolstering its storage portfolio with new guarantees designed to address the growing threat of ransomware and other cyber attacks.
“We will have a new cyber resiliency guarantee which combines our native ransomware protection capability, including immutability and using some of the latest AIOps technology to have anomaly and entropy detection,” Sanjay Jagad, vice president of structured data for HPE Storage, said during the press briefing.
Additional guarantees include zero data loss and downtime protection and productivity improvements through AI-powered operations. Jagad noted that HPE can help customers reduce their operating hours by 40%, while also predicting and resolving issues 10x faster.
For smaller organizations, new entry-level StoreOnce backup appliances offer enterprise-grade protection at a lower price point, starting at just 18 terabytes of capacity.
“Modernization doesn’t happen in isolation, customers need an ecosystem, not just a vendor,” Williams said. “Modernization starts by meeting customers where they are and helping them move forward faster.”
Source:: Network World