Virtualised, managed dedicated server hosting solution critical
for World Cup Success
Sydney, Australia, 02 June 2009 -
Macquarie Hosting, a division of Macquarie
Telecom, today announced it has signed a three - year
fully managed
dedicated server hosting deal with Australia’s Special Broadcasting
Service (SBS)
Under the deal Macquarie Hosting will host SBS’s web portal and
mission critical IPTV and online radio applications consumed by
more than 800,000 people per month. The web portal is the primary
online presence for SBS and delivers a mix of news, current affairs,
sport, entertainment programs and documentaries.
Macquarie Hosting won the deal following a competitive tender
of service providers.
SBS chose Macquarie Hosting for its proven experience working
with digital media and online companies as well as its specialisation
in the design and implementation of scalable, complex managed
business
hosting environments.
The Macquarie Hosting high-availability, fully-managed
server hosting solution will enable SBS to manage peaks in traffic
to its site driven by breaking news, on-air calls to action, popular
shows and live streams of broadcast events.
The deal will also underpin SBS’s plans to diversify and grow
its online content offerings to capitalise on increased consumer
demand for IPTV and mobile TV formats. This will be particularly
crucial in the lead up to the 2010 Football World Cup for which
SBS is the sole online broadcast partner.
A global event that attracts more than 2.2 billion viewers per
series, SBS expects to see its online World Cup broadcasts create
spikes in traffic of up to 500 per cent over the course of the event.
With just under 12 months to prepare, SBS is using the managed
hosting platform from Macquarie Hosting to test the reliability
of new technologies that it will deliver to viewers to keep them
up to date on the latest news and results throughout the championship.
“The Football World Cup is a flagship event on SBS’s broadcasting
calendar. We need to deliver our coverage to audiences no matter
where they are: in their lounge room, at their desk or on the move.
To do this our system needs to be reliable - we simply can’t afford
any downtime,” said David Zufic, IT Manager, SBS Corporation.
“Macquarie Hosting demonstrated to SBS that they had proven experience
in virtualisation and a track record supporting large scale commercial
Internet services. The agreement will help us to translate our television
and radio reputation to the online environment and meet our objective
of being the lead source of multimedia news and entertainment on
the web.”
SBS has set a target to grow the number of unique visitors to
its site by more than 50 per cent over the next three years. Achievement
of this target will see more than 1.2 million unique visitors to
the site per month and more than three million individual video
views.
Comprised of fully managed and load-balanced servers and three
terabytes of managed SAN storage, the
server hosting
solution enables all of SBS’s online services to be consolidated
under a single provider for the first time.
The agreement also gives SBS a hosting solution that is centrally
managed to improve back office workflow and decrease time to market
for new deployments on the website.
SBS’s mission-critical applications and website will be housed
in Macquarie Hosting’s ISO and DSD Gateway certified
data centre,
the Intellicentre.
The High-availability network infrastructure with redundant firewalls,
load balancing, switches and internet ports provide low latency
and security while high-speed tape backup and SAN storage services
provide added redundancy.
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