SoftIron has announced the launch of a local Australian manufacturing facility based in Sydney.
With commissioning to begin in October, the new factory will allow SoftIron to locally manufacture its open-source optimised appliances for scale-out data centres – private and public cloud, and enterprise scale facilities.
During the first phase, SoftIron was awarded the Sovereign Industrial Capability Priority Grant of $1.5 million from the Department of Defence to aid the development of industrial capabilities and encourage innovation to support the Department’s stated Sovereign Industrial Capability Priorities.
According to the company, the factory is believed to mark the first time that component level computer manufacturing has taken place on Australian soil.
“We are really excited to be building a facility as part of our expansion in Australia,” Jason Van der Schyff, Chief Operating Officer at SoftIron, said. “By establishing our first ever factory on Australian soil, we will help further bolster Australia’s data infrastructure resilience by locally manufacturing our world-leading data centre solutions.
"Our products will help our local customers deploy a credible, transparent and trusted alternative to public clouds that are based on imported, opaque hardware.”
SoftIron specialises in storage solutions from the data centre to the edge, with an enterprise storage portfolio which runs at wire-speed and is custom-designed to optimise Ceph. Its appliances reportedly out-perform industry norms on critical metrics including density, energy efficiency, capacity, speed and heat emission.
The new Sydney facility will be the company’s second location in the world, after SoftIron’s California factory, to build and manufacture hardware designed with auditable provenance for key strategic markets.
SoftIron’s new factory further supports the company’s expansion in Australia and the Asia Pacific region, following the launch of its global partner program and hiring of Paul Harris as regional sales director for SoftIron in 2020. With the introduction of a local facility, SoftIron says it will also aim to address and close the skills gap through the hiring and growth of local high tech manufacturing skills.
The company says the advantage of locally manufacturing SoftIron hardware will help customers 'gain transparency, resiliency, and achieve complete data sovereignty'.
“The global supply chain is quite complex, with major security gaps," Jason Van der Schyff added. "The reality is that most data centres don’t know if their appliances are secure since manufacturers tend to operate opaque processes. Our goal is to offer our customers in Australia complete transparency with a range of appliances that are true to their design. Nothing more, nothing less."