National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) Australia has recently announced that they have chosen SoftIron Ltd. to provide Ceph-based object storage for its integrated computational environment.

The objective of the new storage system is to support Australia’s leading researchers through the provision of High-Performance Computing (HPC), Cloud Computing and Data services for a number of high-profile projects for the center, including operational data products.

The NCI system will operate using four classes of storage platforms across the facility: The first will be an HPC storage platform; the second, a facility-wide high-performance persistent storage platform; the third one is set to be a cloud-focused object store; and, finally, the last one will be a large-scale hierarchical storage management (HSM) based archival storage system. The system will leverage the use of open source Ceph through SoftIron’s HyperDrive® storage appliances, initially providing 12.5 Petabytes of object storage for an Openstack cloud framework and the active project data for the various projects using the system.

“The NCI supports Australian researchers from many disciplines with disparate needs, 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. “In building a ‘Supercomputing for All’ approach, we’ve been able to revisit many past assumptions about what, where, and how we deploy, manage and support our data infrastructure. Ubiquitous access to that infrastructure implies exponential growth in the underlying storage demands that will be required to underpin this. Ultimately we chose to leverage the open source route for all the benefits that using an open source-based system conveys to a technology organization. We chose Ceph, specifically, for its maturity and robust capability as a unified, distributed storage system for emerging and non-traditional HPC capabilities. SoftIron became the natural choice after an examination of their Ceph-based HyperDrive appliances.”

“As computing needs increasingly reach into the multi-petabyte realms, the economics of data will require that organizations seek ways to liberate themselves from proprietary data infrastructures which become increasingly expensive to extricate themselves from,” said Phil Straw, CEO of SoftIron. “SoftIron has put the system architects and their organizations back at the center of control, enabling them to ‘have their cake and eat it too’ by providing them with the performance and flexibility they need, without the vendor lock, or the scaling waste and the relative costs of proprietary solutions. We are proud to see organizations like NCI Australia pioneering systems that increasingly leverage open source solutions as the path forward. Installations like this are benchmarks for how systems will be architected to deliver value across wide ranges of use.”