The management of heterogeneous and complex infrastructure landscapes has become a challenge for many organizations. HPE and Morpheus have teamed up to provide an as-a-service model to overcome hybrid cloud management challenges.
By Piyush Jain, Hybrid Infrastructure Solution Lead in HPE’s Hybrid IT Global Competence Center
Here are some of the challenges that we see with multi-cloud usage:
- Complexity: the more cloud environments a company uses, the more complex the management task becomes.
- Skills gaps: The workforce needs to learn multiple clouds.
- Cost control: Multi-cloud usage can lead to sprawl when an organization loses track of where its applications are hosted, or when applications are not being utilized efficiently.
- Governance and compliance: Organizations find it difficult to apply and manage governance and compliance requirements for multiple clouds.
Now that we understand the challenges, what solutions are available? HPE suggests leveraging an effective multi-cloud management framework to manage the entire infrastructure in your data center – be it virtual, physical or in containers – via a single pane of glass. This framework should also manage the end-to end application lifecycle, including approvals, provisioning, backup, scaling, monitoring, and logging.
It would also pose different sets of options, on-console, based on user privileges and authorization, and integrate with your organisation’s people domain directory service.
HPE has partnered with Morpheus Data to offer simplified multi-cloud management. Morpheus is an industry-leading hybrid cloud management platform that brings the cloud experience on-premises, and applies on-prem control to public clouds.
Morpheus delivers the following benefits starting Day 1 – it enables you to:
- Create private clouds, manage public clouds, and consolidate Kubernetes deployment
- Provision applications from a service catalog persona, API/CLI, ITSM, or infrastructure-as-code
- Simplify authentication, establish access controls, set policies, and manage security posture
- Automate lifecycles from start to end, run workflows, and simplify Day-2 operations
- Inventory brownfields, optimize utilization, track cloud spend, and centralize visibility.
HPE Advisory and Professional services offers the following services to customers from various industry verticals to ease multi-cloud management:
Infrastructure as a Service
HPE Advisory and Professional services builds and offers Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) as a standardized and automated offering in which computing resources, complemented by storage and networking capabilities, are offered to users on-demand using Morpheus. These resources can be in a variety of forms, such as virtual, containerized, or bare metal. Self-service interfaces, including an API and a graphical user interface (GUI), are supplied directly to users to provision the services.
Morpheus offers the capability to manage and orchestrate almost any HPE or non-HPE infrastructure resources to deliver a cloud-like experience.
As depicted in the diagram above, Morpheus can integrate with major hypervisors like Azure Stack Hub/HCI/Hyper-V, KVM/OpenStack, VMware ESXi, etc., running on HPE servers to provide virtual machines as a service, along with all major hyperscalers.
It can also integrate with HPE Ezmeral Kubernetes clusters, Upstream K8s clusters and other Kubernetes clusters like OpenShift, Rancher, etc., to provide container application deployment.
Morpheus can manage and automate HPE OneView, MAAS, etc., to provide bare metal provisioning on HPE Synergy or rack mount servers.
The Morpheus VDI Persona provides a virtual desktop environment to grant users access to workstations and applications in a secure manner. You can deploy pools of virtual machines on any supported Morpheus Cloud for users to reserve and use. Morpheus leverages open-source client technologies, such as Apache Guacamole, to provide a performant and secure virtual desktop client for the end user, while wrapping its front-end in a completely new framework.
Storage/Backup as a Service
The second service that HPE builds and offers as part of the HPE multi-cloud framework is Storage as a Service, which provides various storage resources to users for different kind of usage. In this service, the storage provider handles most of the complex aspects of data storage – hardware costs, security, and data integrity – while the end user simply utilizes it for various purposes.
The storage service can be used for a variety of purposes, such as:
- Storing files and folders
- Sharing data with others using private or public links
- Creating volume and mounting it to resources
- Storing backup.
As depicted in the diagram above, Morpheus can integrate with various HPE or non-HPE storage appliances and commodity hardware (for software-defined storage) to offer the following services:
- Public cloud storage service using a unified interface
- Storage Bucket as a Service using software defined storage which is compatible with S3 interface (Ceph or Swift)
- HPE StoreOnce and HPE StoreEasy using NFSv3 or CIFS protocol to offer file share
- HPE 3PAR and HPE Primera to offer storage volume (HPE has also developed custom code to create storage volume and mounts)
- HPE Zetro to offer Backup as a Service for virtual machines.
Network as a Service
The third service that HPE builds and offers as part of the HPE multi-cloud framework is Network as a Service, which provides various network resources to users.
Network as a Service brings software-defined networking with virtual network, router, getaways etc. to the user with ease of operations.
Network services often become a nightmare to manage in a complex multi-cloud environment. Morpheus offers various network services from a single pane of glass for multi/hybrid cloud environments.
As depicted in the diagram above, Morpheus can integrate with various network appliances or networking software to offer the following services:
- Public cloud network service using a unified interface including VPC, network routers etc.
- IP address management for private clouds managed by Morpheus
- Software-defined network orchestration and management like NSX-T/V or ACI
- Creation of virtual networks, segments, routers, gateways, etc.
- Integrate, manage and utilize various load balancers like HA Proxy, A10, F5, NSX-T, AVI, etc.
- Manage domain name servers and provide FQDN to applications provisioned using Morpheus.
Application (PaaS) and Reporting as a Service
The first three services that we talked about above are the most common services to address what various customers identify as their pain points in a multi-cloud environment. HPE goes a step further with Morpheus to offer a multi-cloud framework extended to the application, security, compliance and governance layer, which is often missing from other multi-cloud management methodologies.
HPE works with the customer to understand the application landscape, help identify the gaps, and prepare a plan to offer various types of automation. These include CICD, blueprints using infrastructure-as-code, and catalogs of services to ease provisioning, accelerate time to market and avoid human errors.
Morpheus also offers extended reporting feature which help evaluate the exact cost and usage matrices. Reports can also be presented to higher management with a full bird’s-eye view of the organization infrastructure and cost included.
As depicted in the diagram above, Morpheus offers application and reporting features:
- Integration with various CICD tools like Jenkins, GitHub and others
- Various pre-build applications which can be converted to service catalogs using instances and blueprints
- Configuration management and automation using various industry-standard tools
- Infrastructure as code (IaC) using Terraform, ARM, CloudFormation, K8’s YAML template etc.
- Various reports and analytics with graphs, along with optimization recommendations
- Horizontal and vertical scaling of resources
- Job scheduling.
Security and Compliance as a Service
The last pillar of the HPE hybrid cloud framework is security, compliance and governance. HPE professionals work with the customer to identify the security and compliance baseline for the multi-cloud/hybrid cloud platform based on organization standards.
Morpheus offers various best practices for platform security as well as application, which HPE professionals follow during the design and build phase. Morpheus also offers various security features which can be utilized for Day 2 operations with ease.
As depicted in the diagram above, Morpheus offers various security and compliance management features:
- Integration with many of the most common identity source technologies to offer user management to login with various authorizations.
- Users can store their secrets to Cypher and keys and certificates to trust store.
- Create security groups for eligible platforms and apply certain proxy setting as needed.
- United States Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS)-based Installer
- TLS1.2 with CA signed certificates.
- Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) scanning for compliance.
- Inbuilt policy engine to enforce standards and restricted usages.
- Role based access control (RBAC) for users and tenants.
- Default centralized logging for all resources provisioned using Morpheus
- Creation of budgets for cost control.
- Various ITSM function like approval, CMDB, incident management, etc.
Once you have this infrastructure in place with HPE Advisory and Professional services support, it will help reduce operations overhead, overcome the skills gap for managing multiple cloud providers, and optimize the usage of cloud infrastructure, with significant cost savings.
HPE Advisory and Professional services can help your team to design the right hybrid cloud management infrastructure, which will enable you to get the most out of your existing landscape.
To learn more, see our HPE Hybrid Cloud Solutions – Take a Hybrid Approach
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