Morphlabs just announced its latest private-cloud infrastructure product, the mCloud Helix, at the Oscon conference in Portland. Company CEO Winston Damarillo has long focused this company on what he calls “dynamic infrastructure services,” meaning that he aims to bring touted benefits of public (off-site) cloud such as flexibility and simplicity to on-site, privately controlled infrastructures. He’s also a big open-source guy, having sold GlueCode to IBM in the “early” days.
But to me, the key aspect of Morphlabs is the company’s Philippine roots. It’s headquartered in Los Angeles, but maintains developer teams in Metro Manila as well as Cebu City, the country’s “second city” and an emerging, vibrant technology hub. A sister company, Exist Software, produces custom software and maintains most of its executive and worker-bee teams in the Philippines.
There’s a beautiful word called “pagasa” in use throughout the Philippines. It means “hope,” and companies like Morphlabs bring several dimensions of pagasa to the technology world. For one thing, this developing nation of 90 million souls and counting thirsts for high-value jobs in the technology sectors.
For another, the existence of successful software-development teams in places other than Silicon Valley bring a variety of points-of-view to the task of improving the world. The ideas generated in meet-ups in Manila are often better grounded in daily reality than are the latest valley frou frou addressing the latest first-world problems.
(The present state of google searching brings despair to us all, but you can find some of my earlier writing on the topic by googling “Strukhoff Philippines technology.” )
Morphlabs’s latest is grounded in the reality of OpenStack software and Dell servers. Here’s some of the geek stuff: it high performance SSD-powered nodes and pre-integrated ZFS, to eliminate the need for expensive enterprise SANs; it allegedly sets a new energy standard for watt/virtual CPU (vCPU); its incorporation of Dell PowerEdge C servers utilize the latest hyperscale technology.
A Dell executive has touted it for providing “a simple deployment for a compact private cloud.” For his part, Winston says it “empowers customers to take home and immediately deploy private clouds using best-of-breed open source software and hardware without requiring a massive CapEx investment.” It’s also being sold to service providers, so there’s no lack of confidence about its scalability.
Where there’s pagasa, there’s opportunity, and opportunity breeds innovation. Winston and his global team continue their efforts to bring pagasa to the Philippines and the world – surely, innovation will continue to follow.