The UK’s no.1 property website makes Rightmove choosing ControlCircle for datacentre services
July 28, 2008 – ControlCircle announced that it has been selected by Rightmove plc to provide comprehensive datacentre services along with Intelligent BGP Internet connectivity to ensure systems availability and resilience.
Rightmove.co.uk is the UK’s leading property website with 90% of estate agents in the country and all large new home developers listing and advertising their properties on the site. Rightmove has 79% market share of the online property market based on pages viewed , with over 3 million people looking at the website each month.
Originally, Rightmove operated out of two datacentres to achieve the redundancy required with systems mirrored at each site. Rightmove has shifted to a three data centre approach, locating just one system at each. While it does incur slightly higher datacentre space costs, Rightmove saves a quarter on physical hardware purchases as only three of everything is now bought. Luke West , Rightmove Plc’s technical operations manager explains, “I have been working in datacentres for years and I really like this ‘n+1’ model. Hardware doesn’t sit about in a quiescent state, and it means we can take a data centre down for maintenance, if we need to, without affecting service to our customers and the property buying public.”
ControlCircle has been chosen as Rightmove’s primary datacentre services partner providing support in two of the three data centre sites. ControlCircle is providing space, power, intelligent BGP connectivity (working with various carriers) and ‘remote hands’ engineer services as and when required. To date, Rightmove has taken sixteen racks with ControlCircle with datacentre space sourced from Interxion and VSNL, with the third datacentre run and managed by Telstra. As ControlCircle has invested in its own 20 gigabit Ethernet ring in London, all three datacentres are connected by this high speed link.
Written in Java, the Rightmove website is bespoke built and runs on Solaris-based Sun Microsystems’ servers, using Oracle 10g databases. The company has also deployed a mix of high performance best of breed systems which include Juniper firewalls, F5’s Big-IP application load balancers, Foundry Networks’ BigIron RX-8 switches and network attached storage from NetApp.
The approach to use best of breed suppliers and split key systems and locate them in three datacentres has proved very successful in terms of establishing the resilience required. West explains, “If we lose a web server at one site, we’d continue functioning because the load balancing technology would redistribute load to the other web servers, and if we lost a data base, we could even take a datacentre off line and function perfectly with just two while the issue was sorted.”
West adds, “In other words, we’re offering better than 4-nines availability to the business, meaning IT operational 99.99% of the time which equates to less than an hour down time annually. Last year, for example, this was just 18 minutes for maintenance purposes which was carried out on a Sunday morning so barely noticeable to anyone.”
West concludes, “I like the way ControlCircle works. It’s great to find a company who’s so friendly, flexible and I love the speed at which they work. They’ve been extremely helpful, very proactive and have been able to get very competitive prices for us in terms of hardware and datacentre services, namely rack space and network connectivity.”
Damian Milkins, ControlCircle’s chief executive officer, says, “We are right at the heart of Rightmove’s operation from an IT perspective which shows the type of quality service we deliver. Systems, network and datacentre know-how is paramount to the successful operation of such a mission critical website and we’re proud to be Rightmove’s datacentre services partner.”
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