With the rate of innovation and technology enhancements ever increasing, AC3 is focused on maintaining our position on the leading edge of technology by utilising the best available. Being customer focused, we know that our customers’ requirements can change quickly, so to best serve them we’ve undertaken a consolidation and refresh initiative focusing on our hosted IaaS platform.
Within the Sydney metro region AC3 historically provided services from multiple locations, which were established over several years. A number of these locations came to AC3 through acquisitions and were earmarked for consolidation. Taking a holistic view of the AC3 cloud offering we determined that consolidation, standardisation, reliability, security and scalability requirements would shape the design principles for the project. Meeting these requirements would ensure that the refreshed AC3 cloud solution would serve our customers for the coming years.
From the outset it was strongly held that our commercial cloud offering would continue to be available in both Sydney and Melbourne, so that our customers can run workloads where it makes the most sense for them. Improved Data Centre Interconnectivity (DCI) and upgraded AC3 managed links provide the foundation and flexibility to support geo-dispersed, Active/Active or Active/ Passive solutions.
Building on our strong relationship with Equinix it was decided that all AC3 Cloud nodes would run out of Equinix’s industry leading IBX data centres.
The new refreshed cloud nodes were built utilising best of breed technologies from HPE, F5, Palo Alto and Cisco at the platform layer with multiple tools ensuring that the platform performs optimally at all times.
Planning process
The wealth of talented and experienced project managers, engineers and architects within AC3 meant that the cloud nodes could be designed, implemented and have workloads migrated onto them in under a year. Each aspect of the solution was reviewed in depth to ensure that the guiding design principles were satisfied.
From a networking point of view, a 100G LeafSpine architecture was deployed, bringing a number of improvements, such as higher bandwidth, lower latency, greater scalability and enhanced DCI features. Similarly, compute has been refreshed with the latest blade offerings powered by current generation Intel CPUs. Similarly, the primary storage tiers in each location are provided by All Flash Storage (SSD) arrays to ensure that all servers run optimally.
Standardisation of the refreshed cloud nodes allows our teams to operate with greater agility and efficiency, which leads to an improved overall experience irrespective of the location of workloads.
Set-up
The refresh of our cloud node platform has provided huge benefits for AC3, our customers and the environment. The latest platform offering provides greater performance to VMs while consuming less power due to the improved density of the platform. Compared to previous generations, this new platform takes up less space, consumes less power and generates less heat than the platforms it replaced, which greatly reduces the carbon footprint.
The initial deployment and the continued management of the platforms are managed as a CI/CD pipelines to ensure rapid, consistent automated changes are tracked and controlled by appropriate tooling. The use of such tooling helps to ensure that the initial design principles continue to be met as the platform enters the ‘run’ phase of its life cycle.
Obstacles en route
The biggest issue encountered during the refresh was the onset of the global pandemic. While the cloud infrastructure it enables is exactly the kind of platform needed to help businesses continue to operate while experiencing restrictions, the global pandemic did introduce additional complexity and increased timelines, primarily due to complexities with social distancing and logistics.
The professional approach of the AC3 team worked around these unforeseen obstacles to deliver class leading cloud platforms in both Sydney and Melbourne, on time and on budget. The cloud nodes are now live and supporting AC3’s customers at both locations.
Results
Our refreshed cloud nodes reduce the operational loading for our teams, which leads to increased efficiency, reduced response time and an improved security standpoint that can be experienced by our customers. With the added benefit of the more modern platform, AC3 is enabled to deliver next generation services in our cloud.
