Macquarie Hosting on the money with AFR Access

High availability, complex managed hosting solution to support Fairfax Business Media's new digital media initiative

Sydney, Australia – 19th June 2006 – Fairfax Business Media has signed a three-year deal worth $1 million with Macquarie Hosting, a division of Macquarie Telecom, for managed hosting services supporting its new AFR Access™ product.

AFR Access is a premium online service for investors across equities, commodities, property and managed funds, providing information and data services, search technology and portfolio management tools. The first investor service of its kind, it offers tiered subscription-based access to more than 20 different sources, including The Australian Financial Review, Australian Stock Exchange and Morningstar.

According to Craig Healey, Program Manager Strategy, Fairfax Business Media, “We initially planned to host AFR Access internally, but discovered we needed outside help to ensure the infrastructure requirements could be delivered on budget, within the tight timeframe.”

Fairfax Business Media asked its technology providers for recommendations and was introduced to Macquarie Hosting by The Frame Group, the company engaged to manage the AFR Access application development.

Macquarie Hosting demonstrated it could deliver the managed hosting solution for a fixed cost and within the required time frame of six weeks.

“The solution needed to be available, secure, scalable and reliable,” said Healey. “Macquarie Hosting had the accreditation and demonstrated service levels to achieve this.”

High performance partnership

Macquarie Hosting designed the complex managed hosting solution in conjunction with The Frame Group to ensure coordinated implementation within the six week timeframe requested by Fairfax Business Media.

The solution will be hosted at Macquarie Telecom's dedicated managed hosting facility, the Intellicentre, which is certified to AS/NZS 7799 and DSD Gateway security standards.

The Frame Group undertook all application development based on new Adobe technology and FAST Search indexing technology, which allows users to drill into content by keyword and calendar terms. The company worked on all phases of the project including the high level scope, concept design, vendor selection, operational planning, and software development and deployment.

“We recommended Macquarie Hosting because of the inherent redundancy requirements of AFR Access and for the power of its data centre,” said Jeff Lewis, Manager Application Solutions, The Frame Group.

Under the agreement, Macquarie Hosting is providing and managing the entire infrastructure from the network and servers up, including:

• Redundant firewalls and switches for high availability
• Redundant links to Fairfax Business Media in Sussex Street, Sydney, using different carriers, exchanges and technology (copper and fibre)
• 18 HP servers with a mix of Red Hat Linux and Windows Operating Systems
• Load-balanced web servers for fast, reliable live information feeds
• Clustered database servers to provide greater capacity and redundancy
• Three separate DMZs to ensure security of the Internet gateway, customer database and sensitive content on a staging server
• Connection to Macquarie Telecom's multi-gigabit Internet gateway
• 24/7 monitoring and management of all equipment, including ongoing patching of the operating and security systems

“Macquarie Telecom's performance to date has been exemplary,” said Healey. “The company's professional, agile service has gone a long way to ensure the infrastructure was delivered despite an evolving brief.”

Fairfax Business Media and its customers have the assurance of a high-availability service through a fully redundant infrastructure – with no single point of failure. If a server fails, the load is automatically managed by the other servers to ensure investors using AFR Access can continue using the service without any interruption.

Bandwidth and data requirements can be rapidly scaled to increase information flow during major market and news events, such as Budget reports and company listings.

“AFR Access is a resource rich, high transactional mission-critical application. Given that the information available will be used to support trading activity and other critical financial decisions, redundancy, security and availability are absolutely critical,” said Greg Thomson, Group Executive, Hosting and Security, Macquarie Telecom.

“Macquarie Hosting's proven strength is its ability to deliver high availability managed hosting services that meet these requirements,” added Thomson.

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For more information:
Mandy Galmes
N2N Communications
02 9213 2302
agalmes@n2n.com.au

About Macquarie Telecom

Macquarie Telecom is a leading supplier of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) solutions – including voice, data, mobile and hosting – specialising in the business and government markets. Its dedicated managed hosting and security facility, the Intellicentre, is certified to BS 7799 and DSD Gateway security standards.

Macquarie Telecom provides services to 3,000 business and government customers in Australia and Asia, supporting more than one million business users at work every day. Founded in July 1992, it is one of Australasia's first deregulated telecommunications companies. It expanded its operation into Asia in 2000, and holds carrier licenses in Australia, Singapore and Hong Kong.