Brennan IT bets on cloud

Brennan IT is considering a hybrid data centre solution, following the announcement of a $1.5 million upgrade to its IaaS (infrastructure as a service) platform.

Company managing director Dave Stevens said it is upgrading the capacity, performance and functionality of its infrastructure in response to growing demand for cloud services and expected to soon make further investments.

“We’re very good at sticking to our core business and growing,” Stevens said. “It’s about an ever-increasing infrastructure and how we can leverage that.”

He named Queensland as a geographical hot spot, alongside growth sectors in retail, NFP, financial services, manufacturing and hospitality.

“The economy is good and strong, we’ve got a very significant presence in the market there as well,” he said. “Cloud appeals to all verticals as it is such a compelling value proposition.”

Stevens described the company’s definition of cloud as the provision of virtual machines on a shared platform in a third party data centre where the organisation pays for what they use.

He said Brennan IT was continually looking at company-owned versus third party data centres.

“I think both have compelling benefits, and we’ll probably end up with a hybrid solution, even in Sydney we find ourselves with both owned and third party data centres.”

“Different clients have different requirements and so we need to be flexible. Our primary DC’s are owned and operated by Brennan IT in Sydney and Brisbane however we are also looking at a third party DC in Sydney, as some customers want dual sites within the one region. As our Sydney DC is getting close to capacity we are evaluating other options.”

The company’s clients span a number of verticals and include City Beach, Bankstown City Credit Union, Northline and Outrigger Hotel and Resorts.

Stevens said Brennan IT's hosted Exchange offering was proving popular, and he expected to see increased demand for other applications. He confirmed Hosted SQL, SharePoint and Lync would all be launched before the end of 2011.