The challenge
Rightmove Group Ltd owns and operates the UK’s number one property web site, rightmove.co.uk. The site is used by over 20,000 agents and developers to market properties in cities, towns, villages and remote rural areas right across the country. Home buyers need to be able to access the site 24/7 to view property descriptions and images, contact agents, look at nearby schools, and view the locations on a map. Consequently the site needs to offer exceptional availability and speed.
Rightmove.co.uk is delivered from three interlinked data centres, all of which are live, all of the time. Each data centre is served by a different Internet Service Provider, based in a different physical location and operated by a different vendor. This IT architecture gives the company a high level of in-built resilience, and only two of the company’s three data centres have to be available in order to meet the peak time requirements of the web site. Following its launch in 2000, Rightmove had experienced exceptional growth. The company’s original data centre space could not be expanded, and this was understandably a cause for concern. To overcome the issue, and pave the way for continued growth, the company decided to find a new home for their data.
The solution
In 2008, Rightmove migrated one of its three data centres from its existing provider to Telstra’s high specification colocation facility in London. The company now leases eight racks of space, which house over forty web servers. The Telstra-operated data centre is connected to Rightmove’s other two data centres via a 1Gbps backbone.
Telstra also provides Rightmove with colocation bandwidth to the Internet, with 50 Mbps of guaranteed capacity and the ability to ‘burst’ through this limit, up to 1Gbps, if the web site experiences exceptional peaks in traffic.
This is an EMEA based case study
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