A fully virtualised fail-over disaster recovery environment that has been purpose-built for federal government customers is set to go live later this month.

The disaster recovery data centre has been developed by Macquarie Hosting in partnership with Sun Microsystems and AMD.

An entirely virtualised environment, the ASIO-certified centre uses Sun x64 servers based on AMD multi-core technology.

Until now, many companies have felt business continuity was an expensive extra and were risking financial loss by not having the right systems in place.

Macquarie managing director, Aidan Tudehope, said many companies have felt business continuity was an expensive extra and were risking financial loss by not having the right systems in place.

But virtualisation provides 100 per cent uptime without the need to invest in additional hardware.

"With the launch of the Macquarie Hosting managed fail-over disaster recovery environment, the company now owns the hosting service level agreement with its customers from beginning to end," he said.

"This offers customers the unique advantage of dealing with one supplier bound by an end-to-end service level agreement in the event of a major disaster." Virtualisation eliminates the need for customers to duplicate their hosting infrastructure leveraging existing hardware and global load balancing technology to deliver the required levels of redundancy.

""The virtualised approach is the smarter way forward in this hunt for zero downtime," Tudehope said.

"With all mission critical applications replicated and running in parallel on virtualised servers, customers can ensure data recovery in minutes and independent fail-over operation for extended periods of time if necessary."

The disaster recovery service will link directly to the Macquarie Hosting Intellicentre in Sydney via the Macquarie Telecom Private IP national network, offering customers an affordable way to ensure data replication between the two sites. - with Sandra Rossi