Across all industries, organizations are leveraging a hybrid cloud strategy to accelerate their business. To remain competitive, every business needs to understand what skill sets and resources are required for the right mix of public and private cloud. The trick of it all is how to integrate with and manage the complexity of this multi-sided environment. The answer is to use a hybrid solution.
In the video, New Hybrid Cloud Challenges Require New Solutions, Kurt Lacy, Hybrid Chief Technologist at HPE and Brad Parks, Vice President of Business Development at Morpheus Data discuss how the partnership between HPE and Morpheus Data helps organizations get the best possible hybrid cloud experience.
I’ve highlighted and summarized some key points from the video in this blog:
Q: What are the major industry and business dynamics enterprises are experiencing today that create new challenges in 2020?
Brad: The barrier to entry in traditional markets has almost completely gone away -- meaning large, established companies are having to compete with very agile start-ups. Because of this, speed and agility are driving both the business and technology agenda much more than cost efficiency. Not that economics isn’t still important, but the need to move faster comes up in every conversation.
In addition, application development has taken center stage as a path to help businesses differentiate themselves. In all industries, companies are using internally developed software to improve how they interact with customers, partners, and suppliers. The rise of the public cloud and consumption-based services has also fundamentally changed how IT service delivery is perceived by customers and business stakeholders…in terms of both economics and flexibility.
Q: What are the technology challenges that organizations are facing that relate to those industry and business challenges?
Kurt: Organizations face several challenges:
Development teams and business users want to move fast, but unfortunately, IT operations has to wade through dozens of processes and systems to deploy new application stacks. This means it can take weeks for a new software build to fully go through testing or get put into production.
The truth is, IT doesn’t lack tools or technology. Unfortunately, most large enterprises have a lot of technology elements that do not talk to each other in a coherent or well-orchestrated way. Over time this technical debt gets worse and worse and can create the opposite of agility.
In addition, not only has the on-premises data center become a huge challenge, these same IT teams and enterprise architects are now responsible for managing how and where public cloud resources get used. When you combine legacy technical debt, new public and private cloud platforms, and the impact of new application architectures such as containers, it all adds up to a complexity crisis.
Q: Who is Morpheus Data, and how can they help HPE customers?
Brad: Morpheus is a next-gen, multi-cloud automation and orchestration platform that helps enterprise customers move as fast as small agile startups. We do this by giving teams self-service to provision new application stacks, manage governance and security, and even control cloud use and cost across all of their clouds and platforms…on prem and off.
Our enterprise customers are using us to turn their often complex, on-prem datacenters into a true private cloud complete with an easy to use self-service catalog of applications. At the same time, they use Morpheus to standardize and govern how users are provisioning into the public cloud.
For all of those traditional workloads still on prem, we connect disparate technology elements into repeatable blueprints for the end-to-end provisioning of application stacks. This includes compute, networking, DNS, load balancers, configuration management, logging, monitoring, backup, and more.
Q: How do Morpheus and HPE work together to help customers with this hybrid cloud complexity?
Kurt: HPE has developed a full portfolio of software-defined infrastructure solutions across HPE ProLiant, HPE Synergy, HPE SimpliVity, and HPE Apollo; all are supported by HPE OneView. HPE OneView is HPE’s consolidated API that allows IT to programmatically control all infrastructure from one place. Using the HPE OneView APIIT admins and developers have a choice and can easily utilize the tools that suit their specific needs. Morpheus has directly integrated their software with HPE OneView, so that customers can get bare metal servers as a service just as easy as they would get a VM in AWS or Azure.
HPE and Morpheus work closely not just on engineering initiatives but in the field; we have a shared network of channel partners and professional services teams who can deliver and support the full stack including managed public and private cloud solutions via HPE GreenLake.
Brad: Morpheus has a full Synergy Rack and Nimble Storage array in our internal development lab. We use HPE gear to help improve the velocity of our development and ensure our joint customers get the best experience possible.
Q: What kind of outcomes have customers seen from this partnership?
Brad: Over the last few years, we’ve helped customers provision and manage nearly half a million application instances. And we have seen some powerful results in sectors that include financial services, healthcare, government, and more.
For customers early in their cloud journey, our ability to ingest and optimize existing brownfield environments can lower cloud costs by up to 30%. We’re able to recommend optimal configurations, set power schedules, shut down instances that are no longer used, and set policy to make sure cost never becomes an issue again.
The true power of fully automated, self-service provisioning is in the speed that it enables. One of our large pharmaceutical customers tells us that it used to take them 80 hours to deliver an application environment when a developer requested it. With Morpheus, it takes just 10 minutes for a developer to get what they need.
Watch the full interview, New Hybrid Cloud Challenges Require New Solutions. You can also visit the HPE Composable Ecosystem integrations website to learn more about HPE’s broad software partner community that enables automation initiatives across cloud, DevOps, containers, IT operations, and facilities management.
About the author:
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
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L_Engebretson
Lauren Engebretson is the product marketing manager for HPE Ezmeral at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). Lauren has extensive experience in product management and product marketing across HPE hardware, software, and Infrastructure as a Service solutions. She spearheaded the launch of HPE Composable Infrastructure and HPE Synergy, driving increased awareness, education, and engagement through her technical knowledge and customer-first focus.
