Macquarie Hosting data centre drives carsguide.com.au

Australia (SANEPR.com) June 5, 2008 -- Macquarie Hosting, a division of Macquarie Telecom, today announced it has signed a three year hosting deal with leading Australian automotive website, carsguide.com.au.

Under the deal Macquarie Hosting will provide a high-availability, managed hosting solution comprised of both dedicated and enterprise virtual servers at their data centre to host carsguide.com.au’s recently upgraded website and mission critical applications.

The Macquarie Hosting data centre was chosen by carsguide.com.au for its proven experience with digital media companies as well as its specialization in the design and implementation of complex managed-virtualised hosting environments. Previously, carsguide.com.au’s website and mission-critical applications were hosted partly in-house and partly with an external third-party on dedicated servers.

Macquarie Hosting data centre turbo-charges search with virtualisation
Carsguide.com.au carries more than 80,000 classified listings. New data indexing software was implemented in March to improve search functionality for customers and deliver more targeted opportunities for marketers. To support these upgrades carsguide.com.au needed to improve the scalability of its site to cope with increases in search volume and time on site.

“There is increasing pressure for digital media companies to deliver more relevant and innovative opportunities for marketers to communicate with their audiences. We also need to ensure a feature rich and highly responsive user experience with rapid scalability to cope with increased traffic.” said Marcus Verrall, Head of Technology, carsguide.com.au, News Digital Media.

“Macquarie Hosting quickly understood our specific business needs and provided scalable data centre solutions with a rapid provisioning cycle. The data centre team’s deep understanding of the challenges associated with enterprise virtualised servers was a key factor in our decision to partner with Macquarie Hosting. The clear engagement and provisioning process gave us confidence that they can meet our infrastructure needs both now and in the future.”

Spread across multiple virtual hosts, carsguide.com.au’s mission-critical applications and content will be housed in Macquarie Hosting’s ISO and DSD Gateway certified data centre, the Intellicentre. The data centre provides a high-availability network infrastructure with redundant firewalls, load balancing, switches and Internet ports provide low latency and security. High-speed tape backup and SAN storage services provide added redundancy.

Macquarie Hosting data centre hits to accelerator on implementation
The carsguide.com.au virtualised environment in the Macquarie Hosting data centre was designed and implemented in less than six weeks, half the standard implementation time for virtualised environments. Fast delivery was essential to ensure the support and scalable infrastructure in the data centre was in place to manage increased traffic to carsguide.com.au following the launch of its improved search functionality.

“We are in the midst of a significant boom in the digital media industry as marketers, advertisers and corporations turn to key players in this space to provide an innovative and cost-effective medium to communicate with their audiences,” said Aidan Tudehope, Managing Director, Hosting, Macquarie Telecom.

“These customers need specialised dedicated managed hosting and virtualisation data centre solutions delivered by business partners that understand and can meet the 24/7 demands that the Web dictates.”