NewsOutsourcingInfrastructure

6YS, an Australian provider of hosted application and cloud computing services, is planning to aggressively grow its Ironpoint infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) business by 200% year-over-year.

After a successful trial, 6YS has deployed the Brocade VDX 6720 data center switches at its two data centers as the basis of a single, scalable Ethernet fabric. The service provider is tapping on the VDX switches' Virtual Cluster Switching (VCS) fabric technology in its Ironpoint enterprise cloud architecture.

"Our goal is to provide enterprise-class IT infrastructure to small and medium business customers at a public cloud price point," said Martin von Stein, CTO of 6YS, whose IaaS is aimed at easy and quick provisioning of individual server and network resources or entire virtual data centers at the click of a button.

So, 6YS requires a non-stop network that "just works" with minimum human intervention while allowing for evolutionary change by inter-operating with existing Ethernet and Fiber Channel networks.

The VCS fabric fulfils that requirement by automatically detecting servers, switches, and appliances within its domain. Users can add and remove switches from the fabric and locate physical and virtual servers on any connection without requiring manual reconfiguration. Inter-switch trunks are also created dynamically without user intervention.

In the Australia's Trusted Infrastructure-as-a-Service Cloud Provider Market 2012 report published by Australian analyst firm Longhaus in February 2012, 6YS was ranked 12th out of 170 cloud vendors, out-pacing local providers such as Telstra and Ninefold and was identified as a challenger to market leaders, IBM and Fujitsu.

6YS has also deployed the Brocade NetIron CER 2024 routers to provide multi-carrier metro Ethernet interconnects between its two virtual data centers.