Maureen O'Gara

Morphlabs has launched what it reckons is the first all solid-state drive (SSD) cloud platform.

Yes, Amazon's DynamoDB database uses SSDs, and CloudSigma added SSDs to its public cloud last November but not end-to-end.

The Morphlabs entry is based on Dell hardware that'll be pre-integrated with Morphlabs' open source orchestration widgetry.

They're using Dell's PowerEdge C5220 microservers, part of its so-called hyperscale server line developed by Dell's Data Center Solutions (DCS) team that Dell uses for OpenStack.

Called the mCloud Data Center Unit (DCU), it'll be targeted to data centers, service providers and global enterprise customers. It can be used for hosted or on-premise private clouds across multiple geographies.

Morphlabs is playing the quality of service (QoS) and security card to distinguish it from Amazon and other public IaaS purveyors. Day-to-day, it says, it is impossible to know how fast your VMs will be because they're running on shared infrastructure and some tenants will hog more bandwidth than others and, second, because there aren't enough IOPS to go around.

The mCloud Rack SSD edition is supposed to deliver the industry's most price/performant converged private cloud infrastructure, launching applications "significantly" faster because of the solid-state drives. Morphlabs figures it IOPS are increased by up to 10 times, eliminating the IOPS bottleneck and guaranteeing QoS and data durability.

It says the mCloud Rack's share-nothing modular architecture makes SAN-speed durable-storage affordable while delivering a significantly lower power footprint.

According to Morphlabs CEO Winston Damarillo, "With the Dell PowerEdge C Series platform, we have the largest amount of processing power directly attached to storage allowing us to eliminate traditional SANs."

Traditionally, SSDs have been expensive. But Morphlabs claims that by leveraging Dell's hardware, which combines IOPS and computing power on the same blade, plus its open source orchestration, Morphlabs has eliminated the need to pay $150,000 for an EMC SAN.

It also has to do battle with the likes of VMware. It uses price. It says vBlock runs $7,000 per VM. Its solution should cost $500 per VM.

The gear is designed for extreme power and space efficiency, which lowers operating cost. It's supposed to accelerate time-to-market and reduce costs and complexity by allowing customers to deploy dynamic private cloud solutions in weeks.

The PowerEdge C servers are purpose-built for HPC, Web 2.0, data analytics, hosting and cloud building.

Dell DCS provides Morphlabs with the ability to execute globally and Morphlabs says the platform is now deployed in the US, Japan, Indonesia and the Philippines, its home base.

There can be 12 C5220 microservers in a PowerEdge C5000 shared-infrastructure chassis. The widgetry uses Xeon E3-1200 chips with two or four cores with support for up to a 65W thermal design for the 12-sled microserver and up to 95W TDP for the eight-sled version. It can accommodate four 2.5-inch SSDs per server. There's also networking from Andy Bechtolsheim's Arista Networks.

Morphlabs is offering a free SSD trial.