Macquarie Telecom launches affordable business continuity for mission critical applications

Virtualised managed fail-over disaster recovery environment developed in partnership with Sun Microsystems and AMD

Sydney, Australia – 6 March 2008 – Macquarie Hosting, a division of Macquarie Telecom today announced the launch of its virtualised, managed fail-over disaster recovery environment, purpose built to deliver affordable business continuity to Australian business and Government customers.

An entirely virtualised platform, the environment will run Sun X64 servers based on AMD multi-core technology and will be housed in an ASIO certified data centre in Melbourne.

Until now, many companies have felt business continuity was an expensive extra and were risking financial loss by not having the right systems in place. Now virtualisation offers a robust and scalable managed disaster recovery platform for business and Government customers to achieve one hundred per cent uptime without the need to invest in additional hardware.

With the launch of the Macquarie Hosting managed fail-over disaster recovery environment, the company now owns the hosting service level agreement with its customers from beginning to end. This offers customers the unique advantage of dealing with one supplier bound by an end-to-end service level agreement in the event of a major disaster.

Virtualisation key in hunt for affordable business continuity:

Virtualisation eliminates the need for customers to duplicate their hosting infrastructure and is an affordable business continuity approach, leveraging existing hardware and global load balancing technology to deliver the required levels of redundancy.  
 
“As more and more businesses move online they become 24/7 operators and pressure increases to deliver the necessary levels of uptime and security to meet customer, shareholder and compliance demands, especially in the event of a disaster,” said Aidan Tudehope, Managing Director, Hosting, Macquarie Telecom.

"The virtualised approach is the smarter way forward in this hunt for zero downtime. With all mission critical applications replicated and running in parallel on virtualised servers, customers can ensure data recovery in minutes and independent fail-over operation for extended periods of time if necessary.”

All managed ‘hot fail-over’ services will be delivered via virtualised platforms. Separate environments will be offered for Macquarie Hosting business customers, with a dedicated Defence Signals Directorate (DSD) Certified platform for Macquarie Hosting’s Government customers. Both platforms will be based on Sun Fire X4600 servers and VMware software. The Melbourne data centre site meets ASIO and T4 physical security standards pertaining to design and build.

Managed remotely by Macquarie Hosting staff, each virtual platform is designed to scale rapidly based on customer demand.  Multiple methods of data replication will be available to customers to ensure the disaster recovery environment mirrors production based on the customer’s recovery time objective and recovery point objective.

The disaster recovery service will link directly to the Macquarie Hosting Data Centre in Sydney via the Macquarie Telecom Private IP national network, offering customers an affordable way to ensure data replication between the two sites.