See transformation.

Cloud, AI and Supercomputing Transition Services

Reinvent your organisation

Cloud. AI. ML. API. Data. HPC.
So many promises, so few realisations.

Successful transitions demand empathy, expertise and experience. They depend on planning and fiscal discipline to yield benefits.

We've planned, managed, executed, delivered and reviewed extremely large scale and complex supercomputing, big data, cloud and infrastructure transformations for all organisation shapes and sizes.

Cloud Transplant

Australian Associated Press

AAP is transitioning through business structures and operating models. Its computing assets reflected this journey with tenancies in Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Oracle clouds as well as significant on premise VMware workloads. Fountainhead was engaged to review, recommend, oversee, execute and migrate every single AAP application into the Google Cloud Platform.

As the national newswire for Australia AAP has almost zero tolerance for downtime, so everything was done in parallel. Fountainhead managed subcontractors, staff, management and reporters to deliver a result from a starting point of 180 physical workloads, some dating back decades. Today the organisation enjoys reduced costs, single console management, higher performance and vastly reduced risk through simplification and redundancy.

AAP's tech focus is now on journalism innovation and AI rather than keeping datacentre plates spinning.

Compute Transplant

Intersect Australia

Intersect operated multiple HPC clusters and is the largest aggregator of supercomputing in Australia. Marc Bailey conceived, led, priced and oversaw multiple high performance computing workload capture between facilities throughout tenure at Intersect. These included P2V, V2Cloud, and P2HPC container transitions to/from cluster and cloud environments.

As an example, when the University of Adelaide made a decision to migrate from a legacy hardware environment to a self-serve Openstack cloud it needed to move fast, with zero user disruption.

Intensive Intersect on-site engagement identified 53 workloads and 2PB of data across 45 projects, 16 schools and 170 users that needed rapid rehoming. The team raced against a rigid hardware end of life deadline, and discovered, inventoried, planned, transitioned and operationalised a containerised transplant within 90 days into a 1280 core private cloud. Adelaide's' HPC workloads were equally smoothly captured into National Compute Infrastructure supercomputers.

Conceptual block diagram of University of Adelaide cloud and HPC workload capture

Cloud Migration

Macquarie University

Bailey lead the first whole-of-university migration to Google Cloud in the southern hemisphere.

Unsurprisingly one of the most difficult challenges was migrating 30 years of email history, cruft and infrastructure without breaking the communications lifeblood of the organisation. This was as much a workplace change exercise as a technical puzzle with migration proceeding office by office with parallel training, execution and support teams.

Over 6000 faculty and staff email boxes were migrated from 54 legacy systems including GroupWise, Microsoft Exchange, Pegasus, Sendmail and many others. Every student account was migrated for the start of one semester, with over 120,000 accounts in the final directory. System capacity increased 300X with message throughput increased by over 500X, all with 99.999% uptime.

Once transitioned every person in every department could effortlessly share contacts, calendars, documents, images, videos, and data. Student and staff experience focus elevated from how to communicate to how to collaborate.

Cloud Build

National Research Cloud Creation and Workload Capture

At Intersect Marc Bailey was responsible for the planning, construction, commissioning, operation and utilisation of the NSW nodes of Nectar and RDSI, the national peak hypervisor compute cloud capability of approximately 32,000 CPU cores and 16 petabytes across six datacentres. Supporting assets include interconnects, large scale memory, high speed networking, high I/O disk and virtualised infrastructure based on OpenStack. These capabilities remained unmatched by hyperscalers for more than five years.

Bailey expanded Intersect workload capture throughout NSW, Victoria, and South Australia with innovative business models, competitive pricing, and helpful teams offering intensive personal service.

Image of a hyperspace tunnel to depict Intersect Time cloud and supercomputing

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