Cirrus Networks Holdings Limited has won a significant storage infrastructure upgrade with Geoscience Australia, Australia's national public sector geoscience organisation. Cirrus was awarded the contract in excess of $4.5m, after a comprehensive competitive tender process, and have augmented the current managed services agreement with an additional $500k of professional services to support the implementation. Cirrus partnered with NetApp and Cisco to provide both storage and fibre channel networking hardware in this innovative solution and highlights Cirrus' experience and expertise with data centre infrastructure.

The storage solution is based on NetApp's FAS storage, and Cisco MDS switching and will provide approximately 3PB of useable capacity, with a mix of high-performance SSD and high-density NL-SAS drives to meet the requirements of various workloads. The solution is mirrored across Geoscience Australia's primary and secondary data centres to provide high availability and disaster recovery. Geoscience Australia's current environment was nearing end of life and posed several operational risks to the organisation.

Implementation of the new Cirrus storage solution will mitigate this risk and provide Geoscience Australia with a reliable, and future-ready platform. Geoscience Australia will reduce their existing data centre storage footprint from 14 racks across two sites, down to a single rack in each data centre. This reduction plans to provide Geoscience Australia with a simplified management and administration process resulting from the replacement of a number of disparate storage solutions.

The storage infrastructure upgrade will provide the platform for future data centre upgrades and enable Geoscience Australia to continue work on modernising their on-premise applications and services, whilst also providing future capabilities to extend data services to the cloud.