A turnkey, fully-integrated Intelligent Cloud Fabric which enables deployment and operation of private and hybrid clouds
SoftIron, which is soon to open the first-ever base-level computer manufacturing facility on Australian soil – proudly announces its newest flagship offering, HyperCloud – the world’s first fully turnkey, totally integrated and supported, Intelligent Cloud Fabric.
Designed and manufactured from the ground up by SoftIron in its own factories, HyperCloud is a fully-integrated platform that removes the complexity of integrating the many independent hardware and software layers needed to build and run a unified private or hybrid cloud. Using pre-integrated building blocks, HyperCloud fully automates the provisioning of storage, compute, networking and infrastructure services, providing a fully functioning, multi-tenant cloud that can be deployed in as little as half a day and less than half a rack and scale almost infinitely.
“When we founded SoftIron in 2012, we did it recognising that the industry’s path for manufacturing IT solutions was fundamentally broken for the requirements of the future, both in the core data centre and especially at the edge,” said Phil Straw, CEO and co-founder of SoftIron.
“In essence, SoftIron has completely reinvented and modernised how data infrastructure is designed, manufactured and delivered in virtually every regard. The results are solutions that are superior in virtually every way possible, from power draw and heat emissions, to density, and to eliminating vendor lock-in through our use of open source – the list goes on. We’ve designed a platform for IT solutions that is centred around the modern needs of our customers, enabling them to flexibly scale their IT solution wherever it is needed without the constraints and limitations of traditional commodity hardware-based solutions,” added Straw.
The goal of an intelligent cloud fabric is to dramatically reduce the complexity of operating a resilient, multi-site hybrid cloud by providing stateless building blocks holistically designed and pre-integrated for assimilation by a distributed cloud orchestration control plane. Using these building blocks – the addition of more storage and/or compute resources becomes simply “plug and play.” The result radically simplifies the architecting of a cloud, enabling operations teams to quickly empower application owners and data users to consume and manage services seamlessly across private and public resources.
“Opening the first factory on Australian soil to build the hardware needed to build secure, sovereign, resilient clouds is an honour,” said SoftIron COO, Jason Van der Schyff. “We’re seeing huge demand in the region for the cloud platform that we’re about to start manufacturing here, but at the same time, we regularly hear concerns about supply chain resilience from the more traditional vendors. Our unique ‘Edge manufacturing’ approach – using leading-edge, super flexible production lines, coupled with digital twinning techniques to enable us to execute in region, but plan across our facilities efficiently, really is the way forward we believe in how the IT industry should operate – building long term, resilient capability in the markets we serve. Australia is at the leading edge of nations really taking sovereign capability in IT seriously. In other parts of the world, we see a focus on chip manufacturing with multi-billion dollar investments in building domestic capability – but that’s only part of the challenge. If we’re not also building the economy and skills required to utilise that capability we’re at risk of just shipping those chips back into the same supply chain that exists today! What we’re doing here at SoftIron is, we believe, a model for others to emulate – building not only manufacturing infrastructure but also the associated skills to design, develop and support IT products right here”.
Independent of all public cloud vendors, HyperCloud enables IT generalists to build and operate highly sophisticated hybrid and/or multi-cloud infrastructures that operate with a level of reliability, availability, elasticity and serviceability previously available only to hyperscale cloud builders with specialist skills and access to large engineering teams. HyperCloud’s modular nature, combined with the simplicity with which new compute and storage resources can be added, and the out-of-the-box secure multi-tenancy capabilities mean that the cloud fabric can be scaled up or down just in time, eliminating needless over-provisioning and reducing financial outlay.
“Building and running clouds today is overly complex as engineers battle to integrate disparate layers of technology into a resilient, performant and scalable solution,” said Kenny Van Alstyne, CTO for SoftIron.
“It was time to take a step back and architect an entire platform, from the ground up, with the single task of making cloud consumable. HyperCloud removes the complexity of integrating the many independent hardware and software layers needed to build a cloud into a unified purpose-built fabric. With HyperCloud, you can deploy virtualised and containerised workloads across federated on-premises zones and public clouds, with support for secure multi-tenancy, full programmability, and full lifecycle automation all ‘out of the box.’ We’re giving organisations sophisticated control of their cloud architecture, eliminating the need for complex integrations between multiple vendors and technologies while providing the ability to scale limitlessly as workloads demand, incrementally adding resource services as needed,” added Van Alstyne.
“Public Cloud is popular because it creates a consumption-based experience hiding the complexity of operating a resilient, elastic infrastructure, and the sheer brute force of engineering that is needed to accomplish it – historically, that’s only been possible at hyperscale,” added Phil Straw. “It’s a useful utility in your IT tool belt, but most organisations today want a hybrid model. Creating a complexity breakthrough required a totally new approach to deliver the first and only complete technology to be used specifically for building clouds. After a decade of innovation, HyperCloud realises that goal and will forever change expectations of how clouds can and should be built.”
“In today’s highly competitive infrastructure market, we believe the team at SoftIron is developing and delivering innovative solutions to solve cloud complexity across the stack,” said Daniel Newman, Principal Analyst and CEO of Futurum Research. “Leveraging its trusted supply chain hardware model, coupled with its comprehensive consumption-based offerings, we see a robust long-term growth trajectory for SoftIron as it focuses on meeting the rapidly shifting demands of enterprise IT.”
“We see many of our larger customers embarking on data repatriation projects, tired of the unpredictable egress fees being charged resulting from hosting their apps and data in the public cloud,” commented Dev Tyagi, CSMO at SoftIron+Co channel partner, Boston Limited. ”We’re excited by HyperCloud from SoftIron and its ability to make these hybrid clouds a reality in what promises to be a fraction of the time and with a fraction of the skills needed.”
HyperCloud is available immediately from SoftIron and its partners in the SoftIron + Co. channel program. It is delivered fully capable with no additional licensing required to access any features, computing, or storage capacity.