Marathon & Interdirect

Just The Ticket For Online Booking System Specialists, Interdirect

The Organisation

Established in 1995, Interdirect is a full service marketing agency with offices in Milton Keynes and Manchester. Interdirect’s clients include some of the nation’s best known brands and spans sectors as diverse as luxury health spas, shopping centres and professional bodies.

The Situation

Interdirect creates online shopping and payment systems, as well as online booking systems that allow users to check availability in real time. Many of these interface to third-party back office systems providing completely integrated sales order processing systems.

Because of its importance to the business, Interdirect has always employed its own dedicated staff to handle client hosting, rather than outsourcing to data centre personnel. Using in-house staff has provided a faster response when issues have arisen. However, in an increasingly 24/7 world, clients cannot afford a single minute of downtime as revenues and reputation are at stake.

Interdirect also needed a solution that would reduce power consumption; a critical issue in a data centre environment.

The Approach

After reviewing the options available with 24/7 Uptime, Interdirect agreed that everRun VM would address their virtualisation and high availability requirements.

Marathon’s everRun solution can protect an unlimited number of virtual machines running on the Citrix Xen Server platform. This was vital to Interdirect who previously ran 16 x physical servers. Now all of their environments are running on just two standard Dell servers. If either server suffers component failure, the computing environments continue to operate. This level of fault tolerance allows IT administrators to repair disk failures, network card outages, etc, without incurring any downtime.

The Results

The Interdirect IT team tested the system rigorously – even pulling out all the server cables at the data centre to check the system’s fault tolerance in a live environment. As expected, all systems continued to work without interruption.

Another benefit to Interdirect is that they now have the flexibility to add more computing environments – but without needing to invest in additional server hardware.

Nick Mann, managing director at Interdirect, commented: “We are extremely impressed with the power and simplicity of the Marathon everRun solution. This installation has given us increased confidence in our server hosting platform. The 24/7 Uptime team have been consistently efficient and have provided us with a very high standard of support which, in turn, has enabled us to provide a high level of service to our clients.”