Monash University Implements Cloud Platform for New Data Center
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."
About the Author
Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at [email protected].