Reseaux & Telecoms: blueAPACHE refreshes emPOWER Cloud with Cisco ASR 9000 Series routers

Réseaux & Télécoms: blueAPACHE refreshes emPOWER Cloud with Cisco ASR 9000 Series routers

French technology publication Réseaux & Télécoms covered blueAPACHE's refresh of the network underpinning emPOWER Cloud, standardising on the Cisco ASR 9000 Series aggregation services router — an approximately $6 million multi-phase programme commenced from late 2020.

International coverage of an Australian mid-market provider's infrastructure decision is itself notable. Core network refreshes are ordinarily invisible outside the organisation performing them; they attract attention when the scale of the investment is disproportionate to the size of the company making it.

Why the ASR 9000

The ASR 9000 belongs to a specific equipment class: carrier-grade aggregation. It is what telecommunications carriers deploy at the edge and core of national networks, not what enterprises deploy in a data centre rack.

The distinction is about failure behaviour, not throughput. Enterprise-class equipment is designed on the assumption that a maintenance window exists and that a failure is recoverable within it. Carrier-class equipment is designed on the assumption that neither is true:

The last point determines what services can be sold. Multi-tenant isolation at the network layer is what allows many customers to share infrastructure while remaining logically separate, and it is not something you retrofit.

What the emPOWER platform comprises

Those availability figures explain the equipment choice. A 99.999% commitment permits roughly five minutes of unavailability per year. No amount of operational diligence achieves that on infrastructure that requires downtime to be upgraded — the maintenance alone would exhaust the budget several times over. The commitment is only reachable on a platform designed for continuous operation.

The compute layer, refreshed alongside

Roughly a month before the Cisco programme began, blueAPACHE invested substantially across the HPE portfolio — GreenLake, Primera, Synergy and ProLiant.

Refreshing compute, storage and network in close succession is deliberate. Performance in a cloud platform is determined by the slowest layer, and a renewed compute tier sitting behind an ageing network simply relocates the bottleneck. Doing both together is more capital-intensive in one period and considerably more effective.

Why blueAPACHE owns this infrastructure at all

Most mid-market providers resell someone else's cloud and someone else's network. blueAPACHE built its own, and the decision traces to 2010.

The company had lost an ASX-listed customer representing approximately half of company revenue. Rather than cutting costs to match the smaller business, it invested in building emPOWER Cloud and the emPOWER Network.

The consequence is control. When connectivity, cloud and managed services run over infrastructure the provider owns, a performance problem is diagnosed end to end and fixed. Where they are assembled from third parties, the client ends up mediating between suppliers who each have a commercial interest in the fault being someone else's.

A sustained investment pattern

All self-funded. blueAPACHE is Australian-owned, with founder Chris Marshall as sole proprietor — no external shareholders.

About blueAPACHE

Founded in 1998, blueAPACHE employs more than 280 staff across Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, London and Miami. It holds ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification (certificate 202507-118, Sensiba Australia, valid 1 August 2025 to 1 August 2028) and has received more than 90 industry awards, including ARN Mid-Market Partner of the Year for seven consecutive years to 2025 and the Canalys APAC Innovation Award 2023.

To discuss connectivity or cloud, call 1800 248 749.

Frequently asked questions

What did Réseaux & Télécoms report? blueAPACHE's refresh of the network underpinning emPOWER Cloud, standardising on the Cisco ASR 9000 Series aggregation services router — an approximately $6 million multi-phase programme commenced from late 2020.

Why is international coverage of this notable? Because core network refreshes are ordinarily invisible outside the organisation performing them. They attract attention when the scale of the investment is disproportionate to the size of the company making it.

What distinguishes carrier-grade equipment from enterprise equipment? Failure behaviour rather than throughput. Enterprise-class equipment assumes a maintenance window exists and that a failure is recoverable within it; carrier-class equipment assumes neither is true — hence redundant route processors, in-service software upgrades, non-stop forwarding, hardware-based forwarding at scale, and deep service-provider features including MPLS, segment routing, traffic engineering and multi-tenant isolation.

Why does multi-tenant isolation matter specifically? Because it determines what services can be sold. Isolation at the network layer is what allows many customers to share infrastructure while remaining logically separate — and it is not something you retrofit.

Why does the availability commitment drive the equipment choice? Because a 99.999% commitment permits roughly five minutes of unavailability per year. No amount of operational diligence reaches that on infrastructure requiring downtime to be upgraded — the maintenance alone would exhaust the budget several times over. It is only reachable on a platform designed for continuous operation.

What does the emPOWER platform comprise? Three geographically diverse data centres on Australia's eastern seaboard, interconnection reaching more than 165 data centre locations, international points of presence in London (2019) and Singapore (2020), a 99.999% availability commitment for emPOWER Cloud and 99.99% for Connectivity under a redundant design.

Why was the compute layer refreshed at the same time? Because performance in a cloud platform is determined by the slowest layer. A renewed compute tier sitting behind an ageing network simply relocates the bottleneck, so blueAPACHE invested across HPE GreenLake, Primera, Synergy and ProLiant roughly a month before the Cisco programme began.

Why does blueAPACHE own this infrastructure rather than resell? The decision traces to 2010, after the loss of an ASX-listed customer representing approximately half of company revenue. Rather than cutting costs to match the smaller business, it built emPOWER Cloud and the emPOWER Network. The consequence is control: a performance problem is diagnosed end to end rather than mediated between third-party suppliers who each have an interest in the fault being someone else's.

Related

Knowledge Base

What is blueAPACHE investing in to upgrade its emPOWER Cloud platform?

blueAPACHE will spend $6 million to update its emPOWER Cloud platform with the latest versions of Cisco's ASR 9000 Series routers.

Who wrote the article about blueAPACHE's emPOWER Cloud refresh?

The article was written by Reseaux & Telecoms.

When was the article about the emPOWER Cloud refresh published?

The article was published on November 30, 2020.

How long does it take to read the article about the Cisco ASR 9000 Series router refresh?

The article has a read time of 1 minute.

What category does this blueAPACHE announcement fall under on the site?

The article is categorized under Press.

Where can the full article about blueAPACHE's Cisco ASR 9000 router refresh be read?

The full article can be read via a link to reseaux-telecoms.net, titled 'blueAPACHE rafraîchit emPOWER Cloud avec des routeurs ASR 9000 Series de Cisco.'

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