Macquarie Hosting, a division of Macquarie Telecom, today launched its Dedicated Managed Virtualisation hosting solution.

This is the first Dedicated Managed Virtualisation solution locally that meets the stringent security, availability and redundancy demands of high-transactional online businesses, and medium to large corporate and government organisations in Australia.

Delivered out of Macquarie Hosting’s purpose-built data centre, the Intellicentre, the solution uses VMware software to deliver customers additional capacity and scalability on demand.

Macquarie Hosting’s Dedicated Managed Virtualisation offering is suited for customers with planned or on-demand hosting needs that require significant increases in capacity and resource consumption, including:

• Projects – short-term events such as launches or special offers, anticipated spikes
• Testing – operating systems, patches, application upgrades, development before moving to a production environment
• Proof of concepts – new software or services
• Migration scenarios – provisioning, software migrations, physical server moves
• Disaster recovery – rapid duplication of existing infrastructures and operating systems

“We have customers that need scalability on demand. That means within hours, not the days that have previously been required for more complex hardware or service set up,” said Greg Thomson, Group Executive, Hosting and Security, Macquarie Telecom.

Virtualisation services remove the time and cost barriers to peak projects.

Macquarie Hosting’s experience shows that more IT projects will be designed and implemented to take advantage of this.

“This new offering allows Macquarie Hosting to deliver business and government customers the performance, security and control of dedicated hosting services dynamically and at a lower cost,” said Thomson.

Macquarie Hosting has paired with award-winning online travel service, Webjet to overhaul its existing IT infrastructure. Using Macquarie Hosting’s new virtualisation solution, day one customer, Webjet, has seen the consolidation of 17 physical servers onto three physical servers.

“Macquarie Hosting’s virtualisation offering enables customers to extend the economic life of their existing IT infrastructure by consolidation. This effectively frees up servers for dynamic allocation, growth and redundancy,” said Thomson.

Virtualisation supported by certified security and multi-carrier redundancy

The VMware software permits designated servers in the Macquarie Hosting data centre to be partitioned into multiple "virtual" machines. Customers are then provided their own virtual private server or virtual server farm, the capacity of which can be scaled up or down depending on their specific needs.

Security is enhanced by the unparalleled third-party accreditation standards which Macquarie Hosting’s Intellicentre meets. Certifications include:

• AS/NZS 7799 – widely regarded as the benchmark in information security
• DSD Gateway – a federal government standard which offers assurance that Macquarie Telecom’s internet gateway provides protection from external threats appropriate for systems and data up to and including the "Highly Protected" level of classification

Macquarie Hosting is working with VMware to develop a designated VMware certification.

Availability and redundancy are provided via Macquarie Telecom’s multi-vendor data network which provides fault-tolerant redundancy and security. For example, if one vendor’s network experiences problems, Macquarie Hosting can re-route traffic across another network to ensure 99.997 per cent availability.