SoftIron Pty Ltd., a computer hardware manufacturer, will open a new manufacturing facility in Sydney with commissioning to begin in October, ready for early 2022.
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.
The new manufacturing facility will mark the first time that component level computer manufacturing has taken place within Australia.
“We are really excited to be building a facility as part of our expansion in Australia,” SoftIron chief operating officer Jason Van der Schyff 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 was awarded $1.5 million from the Department of Defence under the Sovereign Industrial Capability Priority Grant, during its first phase. This was provided to aid the development of industrial capabilities and encourage innovation to support Defence’s priorities.
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 radically outperform industry norms on all critical metrics including density, energy efficiency, capacity, speed and heat emission.
As a key milestone in SoftIron’s global “Edge Manufacturing” strategy, the new Sydney facility will be the company’s second location in the world, after its California factory, to build and manufacture hardware designed with auditable provenance for key strategic markets.
To support global operations, SoftIron is also developing a digital twin in Berlin, Germany, mirroring each edge manufacturing location, enabling analysis, planning and optimisation to take place at a global level while still delivering locally manufactured products that capitalise on local skills and supply chain.
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. Introducing a local facility will also aim to address and close the skills gap through the hiring and growth of local high tech manufacturing skills.
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,” Van der Schyff said.
“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.”
For more information, visit http://www.softiron.com.
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