Morphlabs Launches Cloud Appliance

Morphlabs is offering an appliance for enterprise cloud construction. It provides key features of a private cloud, such as provisioning, billing and virtual machine management. The virtual environment can be based on VMware, Citrix Systems, or open source KVM virtual machines.

In addition, Morphlabs mCloud Controller 2.1 and mCloud Server, constitute one rack mount appliance that monitors running virtual machine workloads that have been built with APIs that are compatible with Amazon Web Service's Elastic Compute Cloud.

The mCloud suite is designed for rapid private cloud build out and in some cases is used by cloud service providers as management for their environments as well. The suite is "a cloud enabler in less than three weeks," said Winston Damarillo, CEO of Morphlabs, in an interview.

Morphlabs is able to provide the EC2 compatible APIs by piggy-backing on the work of two open source projects: Eucalyptus.org, which issues the APIs in code under the GPL, and Open Nebula, which issues them under a BSD-style open source license allowing greater latitude of for-profit implementation, said Damarillo.

Eucalyptus is an open source project founded at the University of California at Santa Barbara which produces EC2 compatible APIs; Open Nebula is a similar open source project at the University of Madrid, Spain.

The appliance contains two identical pieces of hardware for redundancy purposes and occupies two units in a standard data center rack. The appliance is loaded with a cloud software that supplies many features of cloud operations. "It's a complete stack," said Damarillo, allowing automated configuration of virtual servers, monitoring the health of the servers, built-in self healing when problems threaten server operation, and "a bird's-eye view of the entire environment."

"The user interface in the network operation center is able to present a large number of virtual machines in one view. They show up in blocks of green, yellow, or red dots. If red, you can drill down on the dot to spot the root of the problem," said Damarillo.

Morphlabs previously launched its mCloud suite in Japan, where it was used by two service providers, CSK Systems, which embedded the mCloud Server in its ArvicioCloud, and BroadBand Tower, a supplier of Internet services and content distributor. The mCloud suite is slated to be used by GoGoTech and ZeroLag, Internet hosting and service providers, Damarillo said.

Morphlabs charges for use of the appliance at a rate of $10 a month per virtual machine, Damarillo said.

Morphlabs is a 34-employee company in El Segundo, Calif. Damarillo is the former founder of Gluecode, an open source middleware stack built around the Apache Software Foundation's Geronimo application server. Gluecode was sold to IBM in 2005 for an undisclosed amount. Damarillo moved on to Simula Labs, which established a marketplace for open source code, and other endeavors. Morphlabs made its North American debut at Interop in Las Vegas April 21.