Geoscience Australia in Canberra.
Publicly listed managed services provider Cirrus Networks has used NetApp and Cisco equipment as part of a significant storage infrastructure upgrade for Geoscience Australia.
The deal, worth $4.5 million, was won following a competitive tender process and augments the current agreement between the government agency and Cirrus with an additional $500,000 of professional services to support the implementation work, which is expected to be completed at the end of this financial year.
Cirrus partnered with NetApp and Cisco to provide both storage and fibre channel networking hardware, highlighting its expertise in data centre infrastructure.
The equipment used in this project involves NetApp’s Fabric Attached Storage (FAS) and Cisco’s Multilayer Director Switch (MDS), providing about three petabytes of useable capacity with a mix of high performance SSD and high density NL-SAS drives to meet various workload requirements.
The solution has been mirrored across Geoscience’s primary and secondary data centre to provide high availability and disaster recovery.
Geoscience Australia’s current environment was nearing end of life and posed several operational risks. The new project will see the organisation shrink its existing data centre storage footprint from 14 racks across two sites down to a single rack in each data centre, replacing a number of disparate storage solutions.
“The storage infrastructure contract success showcases the established data management consultancy skills the Cirrus team offer our clients,” Cirrus managing director Chris McLaughlin said.
In October last year, former Cirrus CEO Matt Sullivan exited the company after 16 years amid a “comprehensive” review and restructure of the business.
According to Cirrus, the restructuring came in response to “the isolated but nonetheless disappointing FY21 financial performance” and in line with “strategic reviews” carried out in the current half-year.
Sullivan's departure came amid a turbulent time for Cirrus as 5G Networks-owned Webcentral attempted an aggressive takeover of the IT service provider.
