Our journey towards R@CMon Storage (Storage-as-a-Service)…

In May 2013 R@CMon went live with an OpenStack cell within the NeCTAR (Australian) Research Cloud confederation. It was an innovation in its own right, targeting the commodity end of both the fundamental and translational research needs of Australia (see R@CMon IDC Spotlight – AMD & DELL). Our technical partner, Dell, has successfully applied the design pattern to many other subsequent Research Cloud nodes, and many other OpenStack based private cloud deployments both nationally and internationally. Shortly after the launch of this initial IaaS compute cell, we introduced Ceph based volume storage, becoming the first volume storage service on the Research Cloud, and in doing so, instigated a collaboration with InkTank (now Redhat). By November 2014 R@CMon launched the “Phase 2” Specialist IaaS cell, an “e”-resource motivated by research that pushes boundaries. Within this cell R@CMon added an RDMA-able interconnect to our storage and compute fabric, instigating an innovative technical collaboration with Mellanox.

Thus R@CMon is an environment to build what we call “21st Century Microscopes” – where researchers orchestrate the instruments, compute, storage, analysis and visualisation themselves, looking down and tuning this 21st century lens, using big data and big computing to make new discoveries.

And accordingly, R@CMon is an environment for innovative data services for the long-tail (if you like – more ICT like). Unashamedly – Our instances of Ceph is what we can “enterprise”, whilst each user or tenant has their own needs on file protocol, capacity and latency.

R@CMon Storage is a collection of storage access methods and underlying storage infrastructure products. Why do we present storage as both front-ends and infrastructure? Because most users want access methods – it should just work, but most microscope builders want infrastructure – it should be a building block. R@CMon Storage is also the Monash operating centre to VicNode – where we explain some of these products.

We now have a series of R@CMon Storage products and services available – ranging from infrastructure products, access methods and data management.