Australian Firm Includes Disaster Recovery

Macquarie Hosting, the managed hosting arm of Australian telecommunications firm Macquarie Telecom announced last week that it had initiated a new virtualized managed disaster recovery service.

In conjunction Sun Microsystems and AMD, the company says the new platform will be used to bring disaster recovery services to government and business customers in Australia.

Despite the fact that disaster recovery and business continuity offerings have become a reasonably widespread must-have element of managed hosting services in recent years, Macquarie says several business have considered them prohibitively expensive until now, paradoxically taking a significant financial risk by not having adequate backup systems in place.

According to Macquarie, new developments in virtualization technology have made it feasible to deliver a successful disaster recovery solution at a cost that customers can validate. Virtualization, says the company, is key to the delivery of its disaster recovery service.

Macquarie says virtualization eradicates the requirement for the customer to duplicate its existing hosting infrastructure, which was the foundation of the majority of the expense in a non-virtualized disaster recovery environment.

The remote service will be hosted in Macquarie’s facility in Melbourne, and will be linked straight to the company’s hosting facility in Sydney via the company’s own national IP network.