SoftIron Collaborates with Servers Australia to Build Highly Scalable Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure

SoftIron 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 super high-performing storage platform that runs at wire-speed and draws as low as 100w per node, Servers Australia installed an initial deployment of over 800TB of storage infrastructure for its VMware-based Private Cloud & Virtual Data Centre (VDC) hosting Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings. The upgrade was conducted with no loss of service for Servers Australia customers.

The new infrastructure platform, among Australia’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 an array of benefits to its customers, including the following:

• 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 level of seamless integration is difficult to achieve without traditional enterprise architecture, where storage capacity is frequently isolated across disparate storage systems. HyperDrive also includes seamless integration through protocols such as 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 their customers for many years, including Veeam. SoftIron HyperDrive is among the few Veeam-accredited open source software-defined storage (SDS) solutions that is also capable of delivering unified storage in both performance and backup tiers with certified immutability features.

“Servers Australia’s mission is to be Australia’s most trusted and innovative hosting provider, delivering the utmost in reliable, performance-based solutions,” said Peter Betyounan, CTO and Co-founder of Servers Australia. “We chose SoftIron’s HyperDrive platform thanks to its ability to seamlessly scale alongside our service offering, delivering the flexibility and features we require to support our customers in achieving their operational goals through resilient, reliable storage.”

“We are seeing a clear shift with organisations exploring open source solutions for data infrastructures that need to be endlessly scalable, but also manageable on every critical front,” said Phil Straw, CEO of SoftIron. “Increasingly, organisations are discovering that Ceph offers them everything that they could possibly want in a storage backbone, however its complexity combined with the inefficiency of common, commoditised hardware means more staffing and expense – a challenge unto itself. 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 specialist skill sets, and savings through the reduced need for cooling and real estate.”