Vocus New Zealand Opts for SoftIron HyperDrive

SoftIron Ltd announced their engagement with telecommunications services company, Vocus NZ Ltd, for their new DataHub storage infrastructure.

DataHub is an object cloud storage service offering that enhances its mission-critical network infrastructure for enterprises and government departments. SoftIron’s HyperDrive family of products will serve as the backbone for the DataHub infrastructure, located in the Vocus Albany data center in Auckland,.

With more than 4,200km of fibre in the ground in New Zealand, Vocus delivers sophisticated network and cloud solutions. Their reach extends internationally across both the Southern Cross and Hawaiki cable systems, with an on-net presence throughout Australia, where the company provides carrier-grade services that extend across Australia, New Zealand, and into AsiaPac and the Western US.

“In a world where industry is creating more data than ever through mobile, edge applications, sensors, and AI, the challenge of future-proofing storage infrastructure to meet customer needs is increasingly impractical using inflexible, proprietary storage solutions,” said Stephen Kurzeja, CTO, Vocus. “We chose SoftIron to provide our open-source storage infrastructure because their hardware is purpose built to optimize Ceph. And, we chose Ceph because it is undoubtedly one of the most powerful, distributed storage platforms available. SoftIron’s proven Ceph-optimized technology provides Vocus with substantial advantages in the metrics that matter the most in storage; density, efficiency, capacity, speed, and heat emission. Together, we provide a completely safe ‘pair of hands’ for our end users. Coupled with Ceph’s proven flexibility as a unified storage platform that offers object, file, and block storage – along with infinite scalability – it was an obvious choice for us.“

“Ceph has effectively become the ‘Linux-of-storage’. Many organizations are increasingly recognizing Ceph’s maturity and its ability to deliver enterprise-grade storage features, without the usual vendor lock-ins, licence costs and inflexibility associated with traditional proprietary solutions. We’ve built the ultimate productization of Ceph in our unique, task-specific HyperDrive storage appliances,” said Phil Straw, CEO, SoftIron.”Our combination of ‘task-specific’ and ‘secure provenance’ manufacturing methods mean that customers can expect optimized performance on every front through engineering that maximizes Ceph, while reducing TCO. What’s more, SoftIron hardware is manufactured in our own facilities, is fully auditable at the source code level, and can be verified free of the hidden ‘extras’ that are so often at the root of common supply chain attacks. SoftIron has re-engineered the IT manufacturing process to deliver value for the next gen of scale-out IT infrastructure challenges, in a world where Sovereign Resilience is becoming increasingly important .“

Kurzeja says that Vocus is embracing open source Ceph, using SoftIron’s HyperDrive, to bring customer benefits that include secure provenance with data sovereignty, and ransomware protection through immutability.

“Open source solutions return control to providers like Vocus, and allow for the creation and delivery of storage solutions which accurately match individual customer requirements,” he said. “DataHub is ideal for those organizations with vast quantities of data and elevated privacy and security priorities, including enterprises, government, and other organizations where security and data fidelity are a priority.”

The HyperDrive family storage appliances span from high-value to performance and are available for POC and purchase. SoftIron offers both traditional purchasing (Capex) and as-a-service (Opex) options.