The UK's no.1 property website makes Rightmove choosing ControlCircle for datacentre services

July 28, 2008 – ControlCircle, the datacentre services company, today announced that it has been selected by Rightmove plc, operators of the UK’s no. 1 residential property portal, to provide comprehensive datacentre services along with Intelligent BG[1]P 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[2] listing and advertising their properties on the site.  In 2007, 1,038,000 properties were displayed, up 236,000 on the previous year, with 4.9 billion page impressions served.  This gives Rightmove 79% market share of the online property market based on pages viewed[3], with over 3 million people looking at the website each month.  This has resulted in impressive financial performance for the company with revenue up 69% to £56.7 million for the year ending December 31, 2007, and profits increasing to £31.4 million, up 77% on the year before. 

Luke West, Rightmove plc’s technical operations managers, says, “We were one of the pioneers of using the web to advertise property for sale or rent, but we’re not an eBay for houses as we don’t serve the end-user.  Our revenue comes from working directly with the property industry whether it be estate agent groups, individual branches, property developers or letting agents working in this country or abroad.”

With the immense level of traffic to the site, ensuring systems availability and resilience has been crucial.  Originally, Rightmove operated out of two datacentres to achieve the redundancy required with systems mirrored at each site. West explains, “We were faced with buying four pieces of hardware – servers, switches, firewalls and so on - and locating two of everything at each of the two sites. The issue, for example, with this model is that you’d have one server at each site operating at 100 percent, with its backup server completely unused, waiting for the primary units to fail so that it could kick in. Self evidently, this was a costly and wasteful approach.”

To address this plus improve manageability while maintaining the systems availability required, Rightmove has shifted to a three data centre approach but 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.  West 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.”

Given this, ControlCircle has been chosen as Rightmove’s primary datacentre services partner providing support in two of the three data centre sites. 
West explains, “Given we now have three datacentres, rather than work and manage three suppliers, three contracts, three SLAs and so forth, it made far more sense and less hassle to work with a specialist like ControlCircle to consolidate some of this operational overhead.”

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.

West adds, “We’ve taken four circuits with ControlCircle.  Two circuits provide datacentre interconnectivity, with two linking us to the Internet at 50 Mb scalable to 1 gigabit to meet demand.  Clearly, we’d never put all our eggs in one basket and completely outsource to just one supplier as that would mean too great a business risk which is why we’re also using Telstra.”

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. 

While Rightmove has specified its own IT infrastructure, it has sought advice from and taken advantage of ControlCircle’s buying power with hardware suppliers. 

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[4] 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.”

Rightmove’s customers manage their data on its systems in two ways.  Firstly, bulk upload of data from the customers sites is uploaded directly to Rightmove’s servers at its three data centres using an automatic data feed. Secondly, the customers can log into Rightmove Plus – a portal typically used by estate agents – which allows properties to be added, changed or deleted as necessary along with pictures and plans submitted. 

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.”

[1] Border Gateway Protocol
[2] 25 out of the 25 largest new home builders in the UK [3] Hitwise December 2007 [4] Four nines availability means up to 52.6 minutes of downtime annually, with five nines only totalling 5.26 minutes