Trusted by Leading Organisations
Enterprise-grade Kubernetes on infrastructure you own — at 60–80% of cloud cost.
Trusted by Leading Organisations
Data Sovereignty
A data centre with an Australian postcode operated by a US company is subject to US jurisdiction. Under the US CLOUD Act, American authorities can compel AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud to produce your data — stored anywhere in the world — without Australian court oversight.
True sovereignty requires Australian ownership of the infrastructure layer, not just Australian geography. NEXTDC is Australian-owned. AWS is not.
Read the full analysis →The CLOUD Act
US law enforcement can compel US companies to produce data stored on any server, anywhere — including AWS Sydney, Azure East Australia, and GCP Sydney.
The Privacy Act Gap
Australia’s Privacy Act governs Australian organisations. It cannot override a US court order served on a US company. These are parallel frameworks with no override mechanism.
The Sugau Difference
Your hardware. Your colocation facility. Australian jurisdiction end to end. No foreign parent company. No CLOUD Act exposure. Auditors get definitive answers, not shared-responsibility disclaimers.
The Business Case
The cloud made sense when you were scaling fast and didn’t know your workload. Now you do — and you’re paying 3–5x what the same infrastructure costs on bare metal.
Eliminate cloud markup and unpredictable scaling costs. Typical clients save 60–80% on infrastructure spend. 37signals saved $10M over five years repatriating from AWS.
Air-gapped bare metal clusters with zero external attack surface. Your data never leaves your infrastructure. Meets GDPR, HIPAA, DORA, and defence compliance requirements public cloud cannot guarantee.
No noisy neighbours. No hypervisor tax. Dedicated resources and full NVMe Gen5 I/O. Your applications get the hardware they paid for — consistently, every time.
ZFS filesystem snapshots every 5 minutes with remote replication. Full cluster recovery from catastrophic failures in minutes, not hours. Automated DR tested regularly.
Infrastructure as code for everything — Ansible playbooks and Helm charts reduce deployment time by 80%. Automated deployments, scaling, backups, and recovery.
Deploy in your own data centre or colocation facility. Full data sovereignty. Zero vendor lock-in — 100% open-source tooling with no dependency on any single cloud provider.
Fine-tune open-source LLMs like Mistral on your own air-gapped infrastructure. Your proprietary data never touches a third-party API. Add intelligent capabilities while maintaining full security and compliance.
No more bill shock. Cloud invoices are unpredictable — egress fees, cross-AZ traffic, IOPS overages, and scaling surcharges compound silently. Bare metal gives you a flat, predictable monthly cost.
Own the entire audit trail. When regulators ask where your data lives, who accesses it, and how it’s protected — you have definitive answers, not shared-responsibility disclaimers.
Real Numbers
Most CTOs have never run an on-premise infrastructure analysis. Here’s what the numbers look like for a representative mid-market workload — 10 servers worth of compute.
After year 3, hardware is fully amortised — savings accelerate further. Your CFO will ask why you didn’t do this sooner.
Note: NEXTDC is Australian-owned. Your data at NEXTDC is outside US CLOUD Act jurisdiction. Your data at AWS Sydney is not.
Side-by-Side
Every capability you rely on in managed Kubernetes — matched or exceeded — at a fraction of the ongoing cost.
| Feature | EKS / GKE | Sugau Bare Metal |
|---|---|---|
| Security & Compliance | ✓ | ✓✓ Enhanced |
| High Availability | ✓ | ✓ Multi-node control plane |
| Automated Backups | ✓ | ✓ Every 5 min (ZFS) |
| Disaster Recovery | ✓ | ✓ Fully automated |
| Monthly Cost (example) | $15,000 | $3,000 – $6,000 |
| Data Sovereignty | ✗ Shared infrastructure | ✓ 100% yours |
| Air-Gapped Option | ✗ Not available | ✓ Specialist capability |
| Vendor Lock-in | ✗ High | ✓ None — 100% open-source |
| Pricing Model | Variable / unpredictable | ✓ Fixed & transparent |
| Network Throughput | Throttled / per-GB billing | ✓ 25–100Gbps flat rate |
| Storage I/O | Provisioned IOPS tiers | ✓ Raw NVMe Gen5 speed |
| Private AI / LLMOps | ✗ Data leaves your control | ✓ Air-gapped fine-tuning & serving |
| CLOUD Act Exposure | ✗ Subject to US jurisdiction | ✓ None — Australian infrastructure |
| Team Training Included | ✗ Not offered | ✓ Every engagement, as standard |
Under the Hood
Everything you’d expect from a managed cloud — plus capabilities they can’t offer at any price.
VM-based Kubernetes on bare metal. ZFS storage for instant snapshots. Multi-node control plane with automated failover. SR-IOV and DPDK for near-wire-speed networking.
ZFS snapshots every 5 minutes with configurable retention. Off-site replication to secondary location. Fully automated DR procedures tested and validated regularly.
Air-gapped architecture with zero internet exposure. Network segmentation. Encryption at rest and in transit. CIS hardening — GDPR, HIPAA, and DORA ready.
Complete observability: Prometheus, Grafana, and ELK. Custom alerts for your SLOs. Performance metrics, capacity planning, and anomaly detection.
Kubernetes-native CI/CD: GitLab CI, Jenkins, internal Git repos, and private container registries. Your entire dev platform on-premises — air-gapped if required.
End-to-end private AI pipeline: fine-tune open-source LLMs with Kubeflow, serve models at scale with vLLM on dedicated GPUs. Your data, your models. No tokens sent to external APIs.
On bare metal you manage the physical NICs directly (25–100Gbps). Flat-rate capacity based on hardware limits — not billed per-GB or throttled by a cloud provider’s virtual network stack.
Unlike cloud where IOPS are throttled or tied to expensive tiers, bare metal lets you saturate the full bus speed of NVMe Gen5 — without the noisy-neighbour effect of shared cloud storage.
Eliminating the hypervisor gives applications direct CPU and memory access. Pod Affinity enables zero-hop PCIe-speed internal communication — eliminating jitter critical for databases and real-time APIs.
Leverage SR-IOV and DPDK for near-wire-speed networking. Hardware features that cloud virtual instances simply cannot expose or match at any price tier.
The Innovation
Most bare metal setups need a team of specialists and months of work. Ours deploys from proven templates in weeks — fully automated, fully tested.
How it works
One lightweight virtualisation layer instead of a bloated OpenStack. VMs deploy from battle-tested templates in minutes, not hours — with performance you can measure and guarantees you can trust.
Fully automated provisioning from templates. No manual setup, no waiting — production-ready VMs deployed in minutes.
Near-native performance guaranteed. Less than 10% virtualisation overhead — your workloads run at bare-metal speed.
Build once, deploy many. A single golden template scales to as many VMs as you need with zero drift.
All sensitive data encrypted on disk by default. Compliance-ready without compromise.
Incremental snapshots replicated offsite — only deltas are transferred. Fast, efficient, and storage-aware.
Full disaster recovery in minutes, not hours. This is not aspirational — it is what we guarantee.
How We Work Together
You never pay for something unproven. Every stage is built, tested, and validated on a parallel environment before touching your production systems.
Up to 8 hours of free analysis. You receive a detailed cost comparison and migration roadmap. No commitment — if the numbers don’t make sense, walk away with the report.
Every stage has a predefined fixed price agreed before work begins. No hourly billing, no scope creep, no invoices you didn’t expect.
Your new infrastructure is built alongside your existing systems. Nothing cuts over until it’s fully validated. You only pay when each stage is delivered to your satisfaction.
Full training, runbooks, and documentation. All automation code is delivered to you. Optional ongoing support at a fixed monthly rate — no lock-in.
Fixed-Price Model
No hourly rates. No retainers. No variable billing. Every stage has a fixed price — you only pay when it’s delivered to your satisfaction.
ENGAGEMENT MODEL
No hourly rates. No open-ended retainers. No surprise invoices. Clear, fixed costs for each defined stage.
WHAT’S INCLUDED
Whether a single-cluster foundation or a full cloud migration, every project includes these as standard.
Get a free 8-hour cost analysis. You receive a detailed written report — no commitment required.
