Cloud Field Day 3 | Morpheus Data | #CFD3

Morpheus Data was our first sponsor at #CFD3 and, as is my custom before Tech Field Day events, I had done zero prep work on Morpheus. I had never heard of the firm, and as first-at-bat sponsors for #CFD3, they were facing 12 delegates full of energy and with decades of Information Technology experience between them. So how’d they do? I came away impressed. Let me tell you why: they have a heart for operations, and I’m an operations guy.

Morpheus Data – Background

I found Morpheus Data’s story pretty compelling when I read up on it later. The company started off more or less as an internal product inside a cost center of Bertram Capital, a private equity firm in the Bay Area. Now every company has a founding mythology, but Morpheus’s range true to me. Here, I’ll quote from their site:

Bertram Labs is a world-class team of software developers and ops professionals whose sole purpose is to rapidly implement IT solutions to fuel the growth of the Bertram portfolio. In 2010, that team needed a 100% infrastructure agnostic cloud management platform which would integrate with the DevOps tools they were using to develop and deploy applications for a range of customers on an unpredictable mix of heterogeneous infrastructure. Such a tool didn’t exist so Bertram Labs created their own solution…

Just that phrase right there -an unpredictable mix of heterogenous infrastructure- comprises the je nais se qua of my success as an 18 year IT Pro. Using ratified standards sent to us from on high by the greyhairs at the IETF & IEEE ivory towers, a competent IT Pro like myself can string together disparate hardware systems into something rational because most vendors sometimes follow those standards.

But it’s very hard work.  It’s not cheap either. And that act -that integration of a Cisco PoE switch with an Aruba access point or an iSCSI storage array with a bunch of Dell servers- isn’t bringing much value to the business. Perhaps it would be different if IT Shops could just start over with a rational greenfield infrastructure design, but that’s rare in my experience because the needs of IT aren’t necessarily aligned with the needs of the business.

Morpheus Data says they grew out of that exact scenario, which is immediately familiar to me as an ops guy. I find that story pretty encouraging; an internal DevOps team working for a private equity firm was able to productize their in-house scripts & techniques and are now a separate company. Damn near inspiring!

So what are they selling?

It’s Glue, basically. But well-articulated & rational glue

Morpheus’ pitch is that their suite of products can take the pain out of managing & provisioning services from your stack of heterogenous stuff whether it’s on-premises, in one cloud, or several clouds. And by taking the pain out, you can move faster and bring more value to the business.

I’m not going to get into each product because frankly, I think they’re poorly named and not very exciting (Sharepoint-esque in a way: Analytics, Governance, Automation, Evolution, Integrations). But don’t let the naming confuse or dissaude you; it’s an exciting product and the pricing model is simple to understand.

Instead, let me describe to you what I saw during Morpheus’ Demo at #CFD:

• Performance data from On-Premise virtualization servers running Hyper-V, VMware, and even Citrix’s XenServer all in one part of the Morpheus web-based portal
• You can drill-down from each host to look at VM performance data too. Morpheus says they’re able to hook into both Hyper-V performance counters and VMware’s performance counters. That’s pretty awesome for a hetergeonous shop
• Performance & controls over IaaS & PaaS instances in both Azure & AWS, again in the same screen
• Menu-driven wizards that let you instantly provision a new virtual machine pre-configured for whatever service you want to run on it. Again -this could be done in the same tool and you can pick where you want it to go
• Cost data from each public clouds
• Rich RBAC controls, which is very important to me from a security & integrity standpoint
• A composable role-based interface. Por ejemplo, you can let your dev team login to Morpheus and not worry about him or her offlining a .vhdx on a Hyper-V server

This chart from their website sums up their offering nicely in comparison with other vendors in this space.

Concluding Thoughts

I’ve worked in IT environments where purchasing has been less than most people would consider as rational. Indeed, I’ve worked at places where we had the very best equipment from multiple vendors, but nobody had the time or talent to integrate it all into a smooth & functional machine in service to the business.

Stepping back, the very nature of the integration puzzle has changed. I mentioned above that a competent IT Pro could stitch together infrastructure that used IETF, IEEE, w3c and other standards-based technologies. Indeed that’s been the story of my career.

But in 2018, the world’s moved on from that, for better and worse. The world’s moved on to proprietary Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), and so I’ve moved with it, creating my own Powershell functions and Python scripts to interact with cloud-based APIs. You can do this too, given enough time & study.

But let’s be honest: it’s hard enough to manage & integrate a heteregenous stack of best-of-breed stuff on-premises. Now your boss comes to you and wants you to add some Azure services & Office 365. And then someone on the business side orders up some Lambdas in AWS, surprise! Or perhaps a distant IT group at your company just went and bought Cloudflare or Rackspace. If you’re still trying to solve standards-based puzzles of yesteryear, while learning how to develop scripts & tools for use in a world of proprietary APIs, you’re probably not bringing much value to the business.

And that’s where Morpheus sees itself slotting in nicely…they’ve done the hard work of integrating with both your legacy on-premises standards-based systems and the API-driven cloud ones, and they release new integrations ‘every two or three weeks.’ They even take requests, so if you’ve got a bespoke stack of stuff that doesn’t surface SNMP properly, you can propose Morpheus build an integration for it.

Sidenote: One of the more dev-focused delegates at #CFD3 criticized the prodcut as too ops-friendly (nobody cares to see all that stuff! he said), but I had to push back on him because details are important for ops teams, and Morpheus can surface an interface that’s safe for devs to use. And that’s why I say they’ve got a heart for operations teams.

On pricing: the products which again, have somewhat confusing names, at least offer simplified pricing. To get workload & ‘core features’ running on a VM in your datacenter, you’ll need to spend $25k to start. That seems high to me, but you’re essentially buying a DevOps integrator & engineer who can work 24/7 and doesn’t need health insurance or take vacation, which is pretty cool, and which helps you bring value to the business.

Disclosures

This blog post was written by me, Jeff Wilson, for publication on my blog, wilson.tech. I was not compensated by Morpheus Data to compose this blog post, and Morpheus did not see it prior to its publication. I learned about the Morpheus Data products during Cloud Field Day 3, an event for IT & Enterprise influencers that was held in April 2018 in Santa Clara California. The Gestalt IT group paid for my airfare, accomodations, and meals during the time I was in Santa Clara. Morpheus and other sponsors paid Gestalt IT to bring Delegate influencers like me to #CFD3

Morpheus Data shwag I took home

• Cool stickers

• A t-shirt