Workopolis turns to outsourcers for data centre job

Canadian online job board Workopolis.com, breaking free of its former owner The Globe and Mail, has outsourced its data centre to Q9 Networks, a partnership that company executives say has turned out well so far for a Web site that’s wielding big data loads.

The Workopolis site fields over three million unique visitors per month and thousands of job postings daily, and is growing at a rate of around 35 per cent each year, according to vice-president of marketing, Max Tremblay.

Director of infrastructure Kevin Megarry balked at the costs and effort required in hosting its own environment. Said Megarry: “When we thought about building our own computer room and location, outsourcing to a co-location seemed like the way to go.”

Armed with a wish-list that included redundant AC units, dual power feeds, different transformers, and power feeds for each individual cabinet, Workopolis auditioned four vendors over a four-month period last winter, eventually settling on Q9 Networks. It shifted its servers over to the co-location in May.

The Toronto-based company won out partly due to its location, a short jaunt from Workopolis’ own downtown offices, which would make the occasional equipment visits or fix-it much easier, but it was its unique hub-and-spoke ISP model that really won over Workopolis.

“They have pretty much every ISP on board,” said Megarry. “If an ISP goes down, it’s re-routed to another ISP automatically.” He said that Q9 was the only company with such an offering, and it was a dealmaker for Workopolis.

Q9 also offered a proper staging area, something some data centres don’t have, said Megarry. “It wasn’t a mess. Some places have the various vendors come in and they just leave cardboard all over the place. There’s none of that cardboard here.”

Workopolis now maintains a cage in Q9’s data centre; they provide Workopolis with racks, space, cooling, and power for the company’s Dell Web servers, IBM database servers, and HP SAN servers, which are protected by the data centre’s cutting-edge biometrics (along with a swipe card).

Megarry is able to keep tabs on the whole operation remotely, using a gigabyte connection between the company’s office and the data centre.

This option is also a good fit with Workopolis’ rapid growth; that way, if it ever moves anywhere else, said Megarry, “We don’t have to take our data centre with us. It allows us to move anywhere we want.”

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Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada

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