Macquarie Telecom ups SQL cluster push

Macquarie Telecom has deployed managed hosting for online training provider BizEd Services, in a bid to help it push into an emerging market for technology using SQL Server clusters.

BizEd Services works up online training infrastructure for customers like Coles Myer, Aristocrat Technologies, ANZ and Australian Defence Industries.

Glen Noble, general manager of data and hosting at Macquarie Telecom, said SQL Server clustering was a technology that had come of age. Clustering SQL Servers could help nail high availability, redundancy and security at an affordable price, he said.

“[SQL Server clustering] is now well proven,” Noble said. “And you can spend a lot of money on [getting] redundancy.”

He said deployments such as those done for BizEd Services were one more step along the road to virtualisation, for instance where a business had shared resources on CPU, memory and hardware.

“We’ll pay BizEd rebates if we don’t make 99.9 percent availability 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” Noble said.

Improved availability and redundancy in themselves tightened security. Further, the new infrastructure could be quadrupled before more hardware or different architectures were needed, Noble added.

Peter Goldrick, managing director at BizEd Services, said that, while redundancy and availability were easily achieved, the service provider also wanted to work with a company with security accreditation from industry bodies.

Department of Defence clearance was particularly important for BizEd Services, which had several defence, banking and finance sector customers, he said.

“Macquarie Telecom was the only organisation that got a tick in the box for all three requirements,” Goldrick said.

Macquarie Telecom would manage dedicated firewalls, clustered dedicated load balancers, Microsoft SQL Server 2000 clusters, load-balanced server farms for all applications, web servers and around the clock support and management for BizEd Services.
 
The clustered SQL Server design let BizEd run multiple, “virtual” SQL instances that each held separate databases to support different versions of the primary web application.