London, February 24, 2022 SoftIron Ltd. is a manufacturer of task-specific data infrastructure appliances and today announced that they have been selected by National Computational Infrastructure Australia (NCI) to provide Ceph object storage for its integrated computational environments.
The new storage system will provide support for Australia’s leading researchers through high-performance computing, cloud computing, and data services. This includes operational data products as well as data products.
NCI is supporting Australian researchers across many disciplines with disparate needs, from High- Performance Computing, High-Performance Data, and High Throughput Computing – all of which have their own set of critical demands that must be addressed across a range of disciplines, said Andrew Howard, Associate Director – Cloud Services at NCI Australia. We’ve been able revisit many of our previous assumptions about how we manage, support, and deploy data infrastructure. Ubiquitous access means exponential growth of the storage needs that will be required to support this infrastructure. We decided to go open-source for all the benefits that an open-source-based system brings to a technology company. Ceph was chosen for its reliability and maturity as a distributed storage system that can be used to store emerging and non-traditional HPC technologies. This storage system offers unprecedented flexibility and can offer object, block, or file storage protocols in a single storage array. It can scale virtually indefinitely to meet any demand. After examining their Ceph-based HyperDrive appliances and their robust array of benefits, SoftIron was the obvious choice.
SoftIron CEO Phil Straw said that as computing needs increase to multi-petabyte levels, the economics and data of data will dictate that organizations look for ways to free themselves from proprietary data infrastructures that become increasingly difficult to remove. SoftIron has placed system architects and their organizations back in control. This allows them to have their cake while still having the ability to control their systems. SoftIron provides them with the performance, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness they require without the vendor lock or the scaling waste and relative costs associated with proprietary solutions. NCI Australia, a pioneer in open-source solutions, is something we are proud of. These installations are a great example of how systems can be designed to deliver value across a wide range of uses.