Swinburne University cuts storage cost in half with switch to SUSE and help from Sydney's Aptira

Cloud services provider Aptira landed a contract with Swinburne University of Technology to deploy storage infrastructure from Linux developer SUSE.

The deployment started in the middle of last year and the infrastructure is now operational for research staff and students.

“We’re excited to be working with Swinburne to help the organisation scale by providing a reliable infrastructure at an affordable and consistent price point,” SUSE territory manager for ANZ David Liubinas said.

“With SUSE Enterprise Storage, we have built a very high-performing and scalable storage landscape at approximately half the cost of traditional storage systems.”

SUSE Enterprise Storage is powered by Ceph technology, a storage system that combines object, block, and file system storage in a single unified storage cluster.

Simon Naughton, director of infrastructure and operations at Swinburne University of Technology, said that the storage solution will help IT be “a better partner” to research teams.

“We can deliver rapid, reliable storage, and guarantee the security and integrity of the data we store,” he said.

“With SUSE Enterprise Storage, we have built a very high-performing and scalable storage landscape at approximately half the cost of traditional storage systems.”

He added the university completed a short trial, comparing the SUSE offering against other vendor products and community Ceph software.

“SUSE Enterprise Storage offered us the best of both worlds—an enterprise-supported solution that is licensed per node, instead of on a capacity basis,” Naughton said.

“This was a differentiator that made the product commercially viable for us. The results confirmed that SUSE aligned perfectly with our goals.”