HPE hybrid cloud: Morpheus is a wide awake for virtualisation
HPE starts its press statements with a quote, straight up, no preamble.
Recent work emanating from the company sees Fidelma Russo, executive vice president of hybrid cloud and CTO at HPE remind us that enterprises modernising for AI, cloud and virtualisation take different paths i.e. some race to accelerate time to market, others double down on security and compliance, while many zero in on cost efficiency and simplicity.
It’s a complex and perhaps inconvenient truth, so how will Russo and team align the company’s platform and approach to serve this challenge?
“We offer a comprehensive cloud portfolio engineered to solve the challenges that matter most to our customers, while giving them the confidence to move fast and stay ahead of their competition,” said Russo.
Driven by what her team defines as an “evolving virtualisation market”, HPE says it is now working to deliver new capabilities to HPE Morpheus software to give users an agile and secure enterprise-grade virtualisation alternative.
What is HPE Morpheus?
Presumably named after the Greek god of dreams (but meant to convey a sense of otherworldliness through virtualised abstraction) HPE Morpheus can be described as a hybrid cloud management platform with a self-service engine that enables cloud-native software engineers to automate, provision and manage workloads (VMs, containers, bare metal) across private clouds, public clouds (all major three hyperscalers are included) and on-premises from a single console.
HPE Morpheus VM Essentials claims to reduce up to 90 percent of VM license costs with multi-hypervisor support and self-service cloud consumption.
New services here include software-defined networking for VMs hosted by the HVM hypervisor in HPE Morpheus VM Essentials and HPE Morpheus Enterprise Software. The zero-trust security with built-in micro-segmentation delivers agility, enhanced networking performance and multi-layered security for virtual machines.
“HPE Juniper Networking’s Apstra Data Center Director will be integrated into HPE Morpheus enabling automated switch configuration and seamless, secure connectivity between virtual machines and hosts. Consistent VLAN and security policy enforcement across physical and virtual networks eliminates human error when moving or migrating virtual machines,” detailed the company, in a press statement.]
HPE Morpheus Enterprise Software now also offers full support for Kubernetes and containerised workloads on top of the HVM hypervisor.
This enhancement is said to give customers a flexible and cost-efficient foundation to run cloud-native applications alongside traditional virtual machines with consistent operations, security and lifecycle management.
Also new to the table, HPE has extended its full-stack AIOps approach across networking and compute with HPE OpsRamp Software. HPE Morpheus Software, HPE OpsRamp Software, and HPE Zerto Software are available standalone or together with the HPE CloudOps Software suite to simplify hybrid cloud operations and optimise resources.
Building an active data layer
HPE announced new innovations with capitalisation-focused GPU company Nvidia to help software engineering teams adopt AI securely and manage data more effectively.
The HPE Alletra Storage MP X10000 Data Intelligence Nodes uses the Nvidia AI Data Platform reference design to create an active data layer that enriches information in real time for AI pipelines.
“New updates for GreenLake include availability of CloudPhysics Plus, Cloud Commit and an enhanced GreenLake Marketplace – all designed to simplify and connect hybrid cloud operations while expanding partner visibility. These new enhancements give customers greater transparency and minimise total cost of operation with new ways to plan, purchase and unlock value through GreenLake,” noted the company, in a press statement.
To accelerate the transition toward secure, resilient hybrid cloud solutions, HPE Financial Services (HPEFS) is also extending existing financing programs for HPE CloudOps Software and HPE Alletra Storage.
If virtualisation is changing as HPE suggests, then the company appears to offer a multiplicity of tools and functions these days. Achieving greater transparency (as HPE has promised) in enterprise computing environments typified by a morphing estate of virtualisation services isn’t easy, but HPE says it’s wide awake and this is no daydream.
