Morpheus Data
Delivering an Amazon-Like Experience in a Private Cloud

We abstract away the pain

Efficient application lifecycle management demands simplified infrastructure and platform services. OpenStack, while inestimably useful for developers, remains very tricky to implement, and provisioning becomes more difficult to manage as the stack expands.

Our goal may be an ‘Amazon-like experience in a private cloud,’ with push-button management of the entire stack, but getting there is a painful process. Integrating today’s increasingly complex environments and development practices is a worthy challenge.

“We abstract away the pain,” says Ashish Mohindroo, General Manager, Morpheus Data. CIOs need to virtualize their compute, storage, and network infrastructure in chaotic circumstances while simultaneously supporting a frictionless development environment. It is not easy to efficiently manage applications across multiple clouds in a hybrid infrastructure when the CIO isn’t guaranteed full visibility of their provisioning solutions. “Any employee today with a credit card,” he notes, “can go out and start setting up a provisioning system on Azure, or Amazon Web Services, and the CIO has no visibility or control.”

Morpheus eliminates this chaos by automating the deployment and management of OpenStack infrastructure, enabling out-of-the-box provisioning anywhere in the stack, and ensures automatic backups, logging, and monitoring of systems. Abstracting away the tangles of a hybrid infrastructure environment is an incredible service, on its own, but game-changing when combined with further improvements in, development, deployment, and management.

From the CIO’s perspective, Morpheus presents an ideal solution: it simplifies application management across an otherwise ungovernable tangle of platforms, while increasing monitoring and governance throughout the stack.

Take the experience of Spireon, one of the largest mobile resource management companies in the world, who used Morpheus to scale their fleet management company at remarkable speed. From their offices in California, Spireon tracks data on millions of connected fleet vehicles, using thousands of servers to store and search enormous amounts of information in real time, nationwide.

Just the MongoDB cluster supporting their real time data was roughly 50 terabytes; the vehicle data cluster twice that. Infrastructure was hybridized between multiple locations and clouds, so scaling their system without the central abstraction layer of Morpheus would have been incredibly difficult, if not impracticable. Before Morpheus, provisioning one of the company’s thousand servers could take five to eight weeks. “Now, they can do it in ten minutes,” says Mohindroo, adding that Spireon saves approximately $ 55,000 every month in logging-related expenses as well.

Mohindroo and the Morpheus team are hard at work expanding what their platform can do. They’ve made significant progress on a central problem in the application space—providing seamless platform management across complex cloud and hybrid infrastructure—and are intensely focused on refining the scope and application of that solution.

There is a lot of effort and investment directed at making OpenStack deployment and provisioning simple, but nothing nearly so integrated and flexible as Morpheus. Deployment is closer to automatic than anyone thought possible, complex cloud management is abstracted, and provisioning nearly effortless throughout the stacks—while the CIO maintains control, visibility, and accountability.

With ever-increasing integration and improvements to Morpheus’ provisioning, backups, logging and monitoring functionalities, it is well positioned to become the industry’s standard Platform-as-a-Service provider.