SolidFire Deployed by BigAir in Australia

BigAir Group Limited, an Australian provider of managed services and cloud-based solutions, selects SolidFire’s all-flash scale-out storage system as a single, multi-tenant platform for its cloud services, including Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS).

By deploying SolidFire’s fast, secure and scalable infrastructure with guaranteed storage performance, BigAir customers can choose the levels of performance, availability, scalability and manageability to meet their business needs.

Gartner recently estimated that the public cloud services market in Australia would reach AU$4.15 billion this year and in 2016, it is forecast to be worth AU$4.74 billion. Through its acquisition of system integrator Oriel Technologies Pty Ltd, BigAir expanded its traditional carrier business to cloud and managed services to meet the growing demand for cloud services. While the company previously deployed multiple flash-based and legacy storage systems, it found that none of them were built to support its customers’ pressing requirements for performance, cloud-based, multi-tenant environments. To boost the growth of new services, a new, modular, next-generation infrastructure was critical.

SolidFire was able to meet these needs and support all of BigAir’s cloud services by providing an all-flash architecture that ensures application predictability and facilitates mixed workload consolidation at scale. With SolidFire’s volume-level QoS, BigAir can deliver guaranteed, predictable performance to its customers and eliminate noisy neighbors. Thanks to SolidFire’s linear scale-out architecture, BigAir and its customers can scale and provision performance and capacity independently and on demand throughout the entire customer lifecycle, without downtime or disruption. SolidFire also automates every aspect of storage provisioning, management and reporting, while monitoring the system to ensure the highest possible levels of availability and performance.

BigAir rolled out its SolidFire-fueled DaaS services in October 2015, with IaaS services to follow in the next few months. Because SolidFire makes it simple to deploy from out-of-the-box to installation and system configuration, the platform was up and running within a few days – four weeks ahead of schedule. While SolidFire is deployed in two data centers, BigAir plans to extend the SolidFire infrastructure to new data centers and eventually migrate other workloads to the SolidFire platform.

“Today we manage over 70 to 100% of our customers’ IT functions from our data centers, with many of our customers moving more and more services to our cloud. Unlike any other vendor, SolidFire gave us an architecture that was built to consolidate and easily manage thousands of workloads,” said Richard Mitton, CTO, Oriel Technologies, a BigAir company. “From its ability to provision and guarantee performance on the fly to its modular, scale-out architecture, our customers were able to reap the benefits of SolidFire’s innovative architecture from day one. SolidFire has proven to be the driving force behind our growing and improved managed services, delivering new value to our customers and complementing BigAir’s existing carrier services.“

“SolidFire was born out of the largest data center infrastructures in the world and purpose-built to help service providers like BigAir meet its customers’ needs for a next-generation infrastructure,” said Kris Day, MD, SolidFire AsiaPac and Japan. “Our goal is to fuel our service providers’ infrastructure so they can provide better cloud services to their customers. But speed alone is not what BigAir’s customers asked for. It comes down to not only fast, but guaranteed performance in a multi-tenant, cloud environment along with efficiency, scalability and automation. BigAir is a perfect example of how the combination of all these elements can deliver IT speed and agility to their customers.“

SolidFire and BigAir discussed the deployment at Cloud Expo Asia in Singapore on October 28-29.