June 3, 2009 – (HOSTSEARCH.COM) – Macquarie Hosting, a division of Macquarie Telecom, has announced it has signed a three year 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-virtualised hosting environments.
The Macquarie Hosting high-availability, fully-managed 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.
Managed virtualised solution sets SBS up for 2010 Football success
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 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.
