Data Centers

Monash University Implements Cloud Platform for New Data Center

• By Leila Meyer
• 01/13/15

Monash University in Melbourne, Australia has established a new cloud data center to support research at the university and throughout the country as part of an open and global cloud infrastructure.

The university's cloud node, named R@CMon, is part of Australia's National eResearch Collaboration Tools and Resources (NeCTAR) Project, which "aims to enhance research collaboration and research outcomes by providing information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure that creates new information centric research capabilities; significantly simplifies the combining of instruments, data, computing, and analysis applications; and enables the development of research workflows based on access to multiple resources," according to the NeCTAR site.

Monash University's cloud data center runs on the Mellanox CloudX platform from Mellanox Technologies. The fabric of the platform is based on Mellanox SwitchX-2 SX1036 Open Ethernet switches, ConnectX-3 NICs and Mellanox LinkX cables, and it uses uses Mellanox end-to-end 10, 40 and 56 Gbps Ethernet solutions.

The university's RDMA Ethernet fabric now exceeds the innovation goals of NeCTAR, according to a news release from Mellanox, and it "tightly integrates Ceph and Lustre storage with the cloud, meeting the needs of block, object and applications workloads as one converged fabric."

Monash University selected Mellanox's RDMA-capable Ethernet technology "due to its performance scalability and cloud efficiency improvements," according to Mellanox.

"The Mellanox SwitchX-2 SX1036 Open Ethernet switches provide the flexibility we need and allow us to mix and match capabilities, which is critical for our dense compute architecture," said Blair Bethwaite, senior cloud architect at the Monash eResearch Centre, in a prepared statement. "Since integrating the Mellanox solutions, we have been able to achieve greater performance than ever before."