SoftIron, a purpose-built and performance-optimised data centre solutions, announced that it has completed the installation of a resilient, S3-compatible and highly scalable hybrid cloud infrastructure with one of Australia’s largest private hosting providers, Servers Australia.
Using SoftIron’s HyperDrive®, a storage platform that draws as low as 100w per node, Servers Australia installed a deployment of over 800TB of storage infrastructure for its VMware-based Private Cloud & Virtual Data Centre (VDC) hosting Infrastructure as a Service offerings. The upgrade was conducted with no loss of service for Servers Australia clients.
What does the partnership mean for clients?
The platform, among Aussie’s highest performing dedicated infrastructure underpins Servers Australia’s 100% uptime Service Level Agreement (SLA), providing uninterrupted service for the hosting provider offerings, including VMware Private Clouds, Dedicated Servers, Colocation Services, Virtual Data Centres, Disaster Recovery Services and DDoS Protection.
The new hybrid cloud platform enables Servers Australia to offer clients these benefit:
- Hosting services that seamlessly expand to meet growing storage needs, achieving operational agility – The SoftIron HyperDrive platform enables the ability to independently scale all components as needs require. This scalability aligns well with a horizontal approach, enabling Servers Australia to stage future expansion by simply adding nodes.
- Unified storage with S3 and Swift compatibility enhances service flexibility for both Servers Australia and its customers – Using the HyperDrive platform, Servers Australia will now be able to offer virtually effortless scalable S3 object storage services to their customers, giving them the ability to provision unified file, block and object storage at will.
This integration is difficult to achieve without enterprise architecture, where storage capacity is frequently isolated across disparate storage systems. HyperDrive also includes seamless integration through protocols like RESTful HTTP API access, CephFS, RBD, SMB, and NFS.
- Verified compatibility against ‘Veeam-Ready for Object’ and ‘Veeam-Ready for Object Immutability’ criteria – Servers Australia has been delivering exceptional backup and recovery services to clients for years. SoftIron HyperDrive is among the few Veeam-accredited open source software-defined storage (SDS) solutions capable of delivering unified storage in performance and backup tiers with certified immutability features.
What were the executives’ thoughts on the partnership?
“Servers Australia’s mission is to be Australia’s most innovative hosting provider, delivering the utmost in reliable, performance-based solutions. We chose SoftIron’s HyperDrive platform thanks to its ability to seamlessly scale alongside our service offering, delivering the features we require to support our customers in achieving their operational goals through resilient, reliable storage,” said Peter Betyounan, CTO and Co-founder of Servers Australia.
“We are seeing a clear shift with firms exploring open source solutions for data infrastructures that need to be endlessly scalable, but also manageable on every critical front. Firms are discovering that Ceph offers them everything that they could possibly want in a storage backbone, however its complexity combined with the inefficiency of commoditised hardware means more staffing and expense – a challenge unto itself,” said Phil Straw, CEO of SoftIron.
“SoftIron is dedicated to abstracting away complexity and providing a level of integration between the hardware and software that is uncommon in the software-defined era.”
“The result is an enterprise-grade storage solution, without the usual vendor lock-in, licence costs and inflexibility associated with traditional proprietary solutions. The additional benefits of SoftIron’s approach include reduced TCO through lower power draw, less requirement for skill sets, and savings through the reduced need for cooling and real estate,” Straw added.
For more detail on Servers Australia’s approach to exceptional service delivery with SoftIron hardware, watch the on-demand webinar, Designed, Not Assembled: the critical role of end-to-end systems in hybrid-cloud or read the use case here. The SoftIron HyperDrive family storage appliances span from high-value to high performance and are available for POC and purchase. SoftIron offers traditional purchasing (CAPEX) and as-a-Service (OPEX) options.
For more information, visit SoftIron’s HyperDrive Storage page.
