1. A Question of Site, Not of Preference
SARION Monarch is our institutional supercomputing architecture, built around a high-bandwidth memory plane of roughly 2.3 TB. It is designed for principals and engineering teams who need frontier-scale models on their own premises, with many concurrent high-throughput sessions.
Hardware at that scale is demanding on a building. Some clients have a facility that can take it. Many do not, through no fault of the property. The question is then where the hardware should live, and who should control it once it is there.
2. The Three Constraints
A building usually fails on one of three counts.
- Power. An institutional appliance needs a dedicated, conditioned supply of a size most residences and offices do not have, along with the backup that goes with it.
- Cooling. Everything the machine draws in power leaves as heat. The room needs a rejection path sized for continuous load, not for a server cupboard.
- Floor loading. The weight of a dense compute installation concentrates on a small area. Many floors, including those of prestigious buildings, were never rated for it.
A site that fails any of the three can sometimes be upgraded. The cost, disruption and permitting can exceed the value of the upgrade, particularly in a historic or leased building.
3. The Monaco Option
For clients whose facilities cannot meet these requirements, we deploy SARION Monarch in a dedicated local data centre in Monaco. Three terms define it.
- The hardware is client-owned. It remains the client's capital asset, not a service the client rents.
- The infrastructure is not shared. The hardware is dedicated to the client, with no other tenant on it.
- The site is local. It sits in Monaco, close to the client rather than in a distant region chosen by a hosting provider's capacity plan.
No hosting price is published. The terms are agreed during consultation, because they depend on the client's requirements.
Ask of any hosted arrangement: if the provider disappeared tomorrow, would the hardware, and everything on it, still be yours to collect? In this arrangement it is, because the hardware was never the provider's.
4. What Changes and What Does Not
Moving the hardware to a data centre changes the physical location. It should not change the principle that the client's data is not on a shared, multi-tenant platform and is not sent to a model vendor.
What changes is the set of people and procedures around the hardware: a facility's staff, its access rules and the way the client reaches the system. Those are the points to examine, because they are where trust shifts from the client's own walls to a facility's controls.
5. Governance Questions Before You Choose
- Who can enter the space? What is the access procedure for the facility's staff, for the client's representatives, and for engineering visits?
- How is the system reached? Which connection does the client use, and what is exposed by it? A remote administration path is a convenience and a surface at the same time.
- Who can see what? Which logs exist, who can read them, and where are they kept?
- What happens at the end? If the client decides to bring the hardware home, how is it moved, wiped or transferred?
- Which jurisdiction applies? The legal setting of the facility, the client and the data should be reviewed with the client's own counsel. Nothing in this memo is legal advice.
6. On-Premise When You Can, Dedicated When You Must
Where a client has a secure room that meets the three requirements, on-premise is the simpler answer: the hardware sits inside the client's perimeter, under the client's keys. SARION Monarch is built for client sovereign secure rooms and facilities.
The Monaco deployment is for the clients who do not have that room. It extends the same ownership model, hardware owned and dedicated to the client, to a site that has the power, cooling and floor loading the client's building lacks.
7. A Short Decision Guide
| If the client has | The usual answer |
|---|---|
| A secure room with the power, cooling and floor loading required | On-premise at the client's site |
| A property that cannot be upgraded, or where upgrade is impractical | Dedicated deployment in Monaco |
| An unresolved question about site capacity | A site survey before any commitment |
To start with a site survey or a confidential consultation on SARION Monarch, contact us through the SARION Monarch page.