News

Four-year plan to upgrade QRIScloud infrastructure

 
14/09/2018

QCIF has recently finalised a detailed four-year infrastructure investment plan for its services to researchers. This plan aims to meet the growing demand for QRIScloud’s compute and storage services which help to enable data-centric research across Queensland, and nationally.

The plan aims to build capacity over time while improving the performance of QRIScloud’s data, compute and network infrastructure.
 
Through a combination of Nectar funding and QCIF member contributions, QCIF has begun implementing the plan. For the remainder of 2018, this includes:

  • A refresh of Virtual Machine (VM) capacity comprised of 2,000 vCPUs with shared local storage for root and ephemeral drives to replace end-of-life equipment.
  • A refresh of Volume Storage, with 280 TB of capacity to replace end-of-life equipment.
  • Repurposing an existing storage array to provide an additional 120 TB of Volume Storage.
  • Scaling the front-end of data storage fabric MeDiCI to support increased use.
  • Adjusting how Collection Storage is presented to the HPC clusters to improve performance.
  • Adding a 100-gigabit network spine for improved interconnection between equipment and to support further expansion to QRIScloud.
  • Provisioning a fibre-channel service from AARNet to enable a reconfiguration and optimisation of QRIScloud’s back end tape storage.
  • Adding 10 PB of tape capacity into QRIScloud’s tape libraries.
  • Procuring a disk-layer into DMF to eliminate latency associated with the retrieval of data from tape.

The QRIScloud team has already been actively working on a number of these projects, with a significant amount of work remaining through to the end of the year. We appreciate your patience while we undertake this expansion and apologise for any inconvenience or interruptions you may experience.
 
If you have any questions about QCIF’s plans, please feel free to contact Stephen Bird (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) or the QRIScloud Help Desk (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.).