Headquartered in Toronto, with offices in eight Canadian cities, Workopolis is the Canadian leader in the Internet recruitment and career transition solutions field, helping employers and candidates connect with each other online. Along with offering employers the tools to post jobs online and search a database of millions of resumes, Workopolis is transforming the online recruitment industry by introducing innovative candidate and employer branding solutions that help better match the right candidates with the right opportunities. Workopolis receives roughly two million visitors each month.
Workopolis is a Web-based company whose business is conducted entirely online. As a result, the company's success is highly dependent on the performance and reliability of the IT infrastructure underpinning various online systems and applications that job seekers, job posters and other customers and partners continuously access.
This infrastructure was hosted in a shared facility that was facing challenges common to many enterprise data centres - a shortage of space, power and cooling for additional infrastructure needed to support Workopolis' operations and growth. When it became necessary to move out of this data centre, Workopolis decided to have all customerfacing systems hosted by a data centre services provider rather than build its own data centre facilities.
"An initial sizing showed that it was neither practical nor cost-effective for us to build and maintain a proper data centre with the stability, performance, reliability and scalability required to support our critical systems," explains Kevin Megarry, Director of Infrastructure at Workopolis.
After reviewing proposals from four bidders, a senior IT management committee at Workopolis selected Q9 Networks as its data centre services provider.
"There were numerous reasons why we chose Q9, including their unique managed bandwidth service whereby they aggregate the services of all the major Canadian Internet service providers," explains Megarry. "This meant I didn't have to arrange with multiple ISPs to ensure redundant, reliable connectivity - I got that automatically with Q9."
Workopolis was also impressed with Q9's power reservation model, which offers a guaranteed supply of power and associated cooling, and is the basis for how Q9 contracts with co-location customers.
"Other bidders had a difficult time providing an accurate quote because their pricing models seemed to be constantly changing," says Megarry. "Q9 already knows the power requirements of all major manufacturers' products, so they were able to estimate quite accurately what our total power requirements were going to be." The power reservation model would later prove to be of additional value when Workopolis subsequently established a secondary data centre site at another Q9 location.
"This model gives us the flexibility to be able to move our equipment back and forth between the two data centres as our business needs dictate, and at no additional cost as long as we don't exceed our contracted power allocation," explains Megarry.
Q9's approach to physical security was also a key factor in being selected by Workopolis.
"Their security, based on two-factor authentication consisting of a physical pass card used in conjunction with biometric authentication, was the best I had ever seen," says Megarry.
Q9 was initially engaged to provide space, power, cooling and security for approximately 100 Workopolis servers and associated equipment, while Workopolis handled its own move into the Q9 facility.
"The Q9 people were always available and quite helpful when we needed to solve technical problems associated with managing our Web services during the move," says Megarry.
Since then, Workopolis has established a secondary site at another Q9 facility to ensure business continuity and provide disaster recovery protection.
"A big part of our decision to partner with Q9 in the first place was that it was the only firm that could offer geographically diverse data centres to support our disaster recovery strategy," explains Megarry.
While secondary data centres are often configured as standby sites (i.e. active-passive), which leads to a 'hope and pray' situation if ever the time comes when there is a failover, Workopolis has implemented an active-active configuration. Traffic for all three of their production Web sites is dynamically load-balanced across both data centres in real time. This approach ensures that if their equipment in one site ever experiences difficulty, the other site would automatically and instantly handle the full Web traffic load and Workopolis' business would not miss a beat.
"Leveraging Q9's cost-effective, redundant data centre connectivity has allowed us to run a highly available, active-active platform, using proprietary site-to-site load-balancing technologies," says Megarry, "And because both sites are always live and handling traffic, we never have to worry about a failure on either side."
Workopolis also continues to use Q9 'hands & eyes' support. If a piece of equipment requires someone to enter a command or flip a power switch, for example, they can simply call to have a Q9 technician perform the task on their behalf.
"We've done this on numerous occasions, such as when a server gets to a point where we simply can't control it remotely."
Apart from never having experienced a single outage over the course of its several-year relationship with Q9, Workopolis is enjoying numerous additional business and technical benefits. One is the improvement in online application performance customers experience as a result of Q9's ISP aggregation model, which provides the shortest network connection path to their audience.
Megarry also suggests that one of the beauties of co-location is that if they continue to grow and have to move their head office, they won't have to move their IT infrastructure as well.
"We'll simply put in a network connection between our new location and our installation at Q9. This will mean a huge cost avoidance, to say nothing of avoiding potential business interruption," says Megarry.
Megarry and his team are also finding it very useful to be able to monitor power consumption - right down to daily power usage at the individual rack level - using Q9's customer portal. As they undertake infrastructure initiatives such as virtualizing their servers, for example, they can readily see how much they are able to reduce power consumption.
"Q9 is really quite proactive about monitoring its environment," states Megarry emphatically. "On several occasions when we've been doing some maintenance on our infrastructure and have forgotten to inform Q9, they've contacted us right away to alert us that a particular piece of equipment was down. With other service providers I've experienced, we've had services down for a week before they noticed it."
Q9 also continually monitors bandwidth usage for anything out of the ordinary.
"If there's ever a big spike or drop in bandwidth, they are quick to call us to make sure we are aware of it, even though we do our own monitoring as well," says Megarry. "I really like Q9's expertise - this is their core business and they are experts in this field. Everyone I've dealt with at Q9, from technical people to sales people and management, has been extremely professional and very knowledgeable."
