Melbourne-based Discount Domain Names Service revamped its network ahead of the launch of a new web portal-based business in anticipation of significant traffic.
The new DDNS business — Information Brokers — went live last week.
"We've developed a business-to-business portal that provides information on property, credit, directors' reports, and real estate and motor vehicle reports," said DDNS Group CEO Rod Keys.
DDNS began life as an ISP offering dial-up services, then became a domain name registrar after the end of Melbourne IT's monopoly on .com.au.
The company has "spent the last 10 years negotiating with government" in the lead-up to the launch of Information Brokers, Keys said.
"We've taken a lot of the red tape and complexity out of ordering those reports and products directly through government...
"We saw a need for a whole lot of business reports to be available in the one spot."
The company is accredited with Crimtrac, the agency that maintains the database used for police background checks.
In the lead-up to the launch and in anticipation of increased traffic volumes, DDNS carried out a data centre migration, in August moving to NextDC's M1 facility and contracting with Vocus for upstream connectivity.
"When we saw the potential volume of orders that we would get on to Information Brokers site, although we had existing registrar businesses that were coping with the data centre we were in, we felt that we needed to be in a more up-to-date data centre," Keys said.
The data centre migration was followed by an upgrade of DDNS's network switches. The network rebuild has revolved around Brocade's VDX 6740 10Gb top-of-rack switches.
Although DDNS was already using 10 gig switches, sysadmin Adi Pircalabu said the stability and latency of the existing setup was not acceptable for dealing with increased traffic.
"[Reseller] MYCOM and Brocade together gave us the opportunity for a proof of concept and let us run a loaner switch within our network for a 30-day period, which we felt was really important because it gave us a chance to test it in a real live production environment," Keys said.
The proof of concept was carried out in November.
"We've been running an array of the Brocade switches since late November in production and it's been beautiful," Keys said.