SoftIron has announced the launch of a local Australian manufacturing facility. Based in Sydney and commissioning to begin in October, the new factory will allow SoftIron locally to manufacture its open-source optimised appliances for scale-out data centres – private and public cloud, and enterprise scale facilities.

During the first phase, SoftIron was awarded the Sovereign Industrial Capability Priority Grant of $1.5m from the Department of Defence to aid the development of industrial capabilities and encourage innovation to support the Department’s stated Sovereign Industrial Capability 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 out-perform industry norms on all critical metrics including: density, energy efficiency, capacity, speed and heat emission.

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 SoftIron’s 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 product capitalising 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. The introduction of a local facility will also aim to address and close the skills gap through the hiring and growth of local high tech manufacturing skills.