The Situation:

Ozsale is Australia’s first and exclusive private online shopping club which works through offering designer goods at highly discounted rates to people who have signed up as members. There are two tiers of membership, ‘Free’ and ‘Priority Member’. ‘Free’ membership is exactly that, free. There is no membership fee and members are able to purchase online. For a small fee, ‘Priority Members’ receive early access to sales and discounts on the shipping fees.

The success of the business lies in the frequency and volume of sales. The business model revolves around stock moving very quickly, there are new sales every day and stock is only available for 2-3 days, instilling a sense of urgency. Often stock is sold out during the first day of the sale and members know that if they see something they want, they need to buy it quickly. And they do. This also means that members look at the site every day as new stock is released.

The entire business relies on the quality of the infrastructure with the site receiving peak loads at the beginning of sales and then plateauing out for the rest of the day. The infrastructure needs to be robust enough to cope with the spike of peak demands. Not only are there peaks of visitors to the site, but the membership itself is growing at an exponential rate.

The Challenge:

When the business was launched in Australia it was hosted overseas, but it soon became apparent that as the business grew, the performance became worse and worse with server latency issues and Ozsale had clearly outgrown the capability of their initial infrastructure. They were recommended to ICO through a business contact and after discussions on the best approach, entrusted the critical back-end infrastructure to ICO in 2007.

Due to the nature of the business and the sense of urgency that Ozsale has created around their sales, the site receives heavy spikes of activity each morning after the newsletter has been sent out. It was important that the infrastructure had the capacity to handle this unusual pattern of demand.



Initially the solution comprised of 2 high-end physical dedicated servers which suited the business at the time. One was a web server, the other a database server. There was no redundancy for either server. However ICO identified that with their continuing success, Ozsale would need to upgrade their infrastructure to cope with not only the increase in sales but also the expanded online presence. It was important to be proactive and prepare the back-end infrastructure for the rapid growth, enabling the migration to be done without any major impact to the business, rather than as a reactive approach done in an emergency.

“We have always been most impressed with how ICO builds relationships with their customers. Our Account Manager is always very helpful and offers experienced advice for future growth strategies and scalability. We are growing rapidly. We need to know that the company responsible for the back-end of our business is able to support that and we certainly have that in ICO.” Gavin Cliffe, IT Manager, Ozsale

The Solution:

ICO proposed that Ozsale move to a clustered virtualized infrastructure which would not only be highly scalable but would also have complete auto fail-over and redundancy capabilities to ensure against any potential hardware failures which would impact the business. This clustered solution is perfect for a business that could not afford to have any outage.

All of Ozsale’s servers were virtualized and migrated onto their own dedicated cluster of hosts, fully managed by ICO and residing in ICO’s ASIO T4 rated data centre. The virtualized environment is run on VMware and comprises all aspects of VSphere4 including vMotion for live migration. Essentially, should any of the redundant hosts fail, all of the dedicated virtual servers will migrate to the remaining hosts with no loss of data or impact to the business.

“We are absolutely happy with ICO and the new virtualized environment. We have the Level II Management service which is excellent. It was great when our ICO Account Manager contacted us to suggest we start looking at other solutions. They are always proactively working with us and ensuring that we are on the best infrastructure for our business. The ICO Support Team runs on an excellent system which ensures that there is no queuing and waiting for responses. Calls are answered and any problems are worked on immediately to ensure minimum impact for the customer. This makes a massive difference to our business.” Gavin Cliffe, IT Manager, Ozsale

The underlying host infrastructure is completely redundant and has the capability to scale with the business. As with all of ICO solutions, Ozsale’s new infrastructure has a 99.999% network uptime guarantee and 24x7 immediate response Support.

Now expansion is a simple case of deploying additional virtual servers without any impact to the cluster as a whole.

“It’s great being able to call and get through to the right person. All of our software licensing requirements were sorted out by ICO which is great as this is usually out of the scope of ‘hosters’. The main thing for us is that ICO are always working with us to look at how we can increase capacity to meet the expanding business.” Gavin Cliffe, IT Manager, Ozsale