Atturra expands its sovereign cloud capabilities with NextDC

IT solutions provider Atturra has expanded its sovereign cloud capabilities by deploying new infrastructure in NextDC ‘s S3 data centre in Artarmon, Sydney.

This expansion will allow the company to meet rapidly growing client demand for domestically located cloud compute and storage capacity.

It will also enhance Atturra’s ability to support the increasing need for artificial intelligence (AI) -as-a-service workloads for clients across Australia.

The new S3 deployment is based on a composable compute platform providing fluid resources for up to 36 servers and 400 terabytes of storage.

Chris McLaughlin, executive general manager of managed services at Atturra, said Atturra’s preference is to use Tier IV certified data centres and NextDC S3 fits that requirement.

“The proximity of the data centre to our engineers and customers is also a factor,” he said. “In the past, we have had power restrictions in some locations. However, we don’t expect this to be an issue in the near future.”

He told ARN that the company has engineered all of its locations “to endure multiple link failures and still be operational.”

“This has resulted in our downtime in the last 12 months being measured in just a few minutes,” McLaughlin said.

For Atturra’s clients, the new capacity will mean faster provisioning times together with the ability to connect to other Atturra services.

“These include our AI-powered services that were recently announced in conjunction with HPE and Nuix,” said McLaughlin.

According to McLaughlin, Atturra selected HPE Synergy as its primary composable compute platform.

“Unlike traditional converged infrastructure, the fluid resource pools for storage, networking, and compute resources are not bound by fixed ratios,” he said. “This flexibility allows us to dynamically compose, tear down, and recompose resources based on workload requirements, ensuring optimal performance and efficiency.”

While the unified application programming interface streamlines automation, it also integrates ‘seamlessly’ with Atturra’s deployment tools.

“This reduces the time and effort required for onboarding, allowing us to deliver faster and more efficient solutions,” said McLaughlin.

Atturra will also continue to use VMware across its platforms, with this expansion enabling it to be more agnostic with its customers’ choice of hypervisor.

“We will be able to offer AI-powered services to our existing private cloud customers out of the same location,” said McLaughlin. “The proximity to each other ensures minimal latency between these workloads.”

He noted that an increased number of clients are coming to realise that not all compute workloads are suited to the platforms provided by cloud hyperscalers.

“We are seeing customers repatriating workloads that would have historically defaulted to the public cloud,” McLaughlin said.

When completed, the cloud capacity will become part of Atturra’s national private cloud capacity served out of multiple NextDC data centres.

The new private cloud capacity will also be used to host a variety of workloads for Atturra clients, including infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service deployments. Object storage, firewalls, and backup-as-a-service will also be offered.

Atturra expects to “consolidate many of the services from its related cloud acquisitions into this environment,” although McLaughlin was unable to give ARN any specifics.

Steve Martin, head of sales, major markets Australia at NextDC, said, “Atturra’s expertise in the AI space is well-established. This collaboration underscores our mission to provide robust, scalable, AI-ready infrastructure that meets the future growth requirements of our partners and their clients.”