Romeike was established over 150 years ago and now, through word of mouth and reputation, a large proportion of the UK PR and communications industry relies on it. This puts the company under enormous pressure to ensure its services are up-to-date and operational 24 hours a day.

To do this, Romeike employs a team of researchers who monitor the media market continually for details of new launches, publication closures, personnel changes and so on – up to 30,000 updates per week are made to Mediadisk, their flagship database for media contacts.

To ensure the availability of this information, Romeike partners with managed hosting specialist, Globix UK, to ensure that the 22 servers that hold this data, and the SQL connections that deliver the updates to the clients, are fully operational at all times.

Romeike has always outsourced the management of its Web infrastructure to a third party. However, in 2003, it realised that its current hosting provider could no longer offer the flexibility it needed from a technology partner.

Romeike’s hosting requirements had already grown exponentially and faced with the launch of the significant upgrade of Mediadisk, it made economic sense to purchase, rather than continue to lease a farm of servers. However, Romeike’s previous hosting partner did not have an economic proposition to meet these requirements.

“Our business requirements had changed, but our hosting partner could not change with us,” explained Neil Martin, IT Director, Romeike. “Due to the amount of processing power we now need, we realised it would make more economical sense to purchase our own hardware and pay for it to be managed by a hosting provider that could accommodate both our current needs and future growth. On a three year capital write-off programme we estimated that this decision would save the equivalent of paying for the servers 48 times over!”

The task of selecting the hosting provider fell to Neil and his network teams. When they started to consider hosting providers, they looked at a number of options, as Neil explains: “In terms of technology, most hosting service providers offer a broadly similar range of options. Therefore, what was critical to us was the chemistry between our in-house IT team and the providers’ employees. We need to be able to work as a single team to guarantee the performance of our services.”

Neil also wanted a flexible hosting arrangement where he could purchase key elements of the infrastructure – servers, load balancers and firewalls and so on – but still benefit from the power, redundancy and support services provided by a managed hosting provider.

Globix offered this and more. Its Professional Services team worked with Neil to ensure that a resilient, scalable infrastructure was designed and implemented in time for the migration from Romeike’s existing hosting provider. It also helped rationalise the cost of buying the servers by purchasing them on Romeike’s behalf, enabling it to benefit from the discounts Globix accrues as a result of its purchasing power.

Under the terms of the agreement, Romeike continues to manage these servers remotely, while Globix maintains the remainder of the infrastructure, ensuring the performance of the Cisco switches, Alteon load balancers and Nokia firewalls, in addition to managing backup services. To add further guarantees and to ensure high availability of Romeike’s services, the entire system is fully mirrored to ensure absolute redundancy.

The full Mediadisk 2006 upgrade is planned in a number of stages. Firstly, the original hosted application needed to be moved to its new home at Globix. This took place late 2005 and the operation was totally seamless.

“The migration from our previous hosting company was smooth. Where issues did arise, and there will always be issues, they were well managed by Globix and solutions were put in place before a client facing problem occurred,” explained Neil. “When Globix did hit a problem the effort they were prepared to put in – even when it wasn’t their fault – was incredible. Globix works like a highly oiled machine. They are the perfect example of suppliers we want to work with,” continued Neil.

The next stage in the Mediadisk migration involves moving clients over from the older hosted application as well as from the 2000+ LAN customers. This will take place throughout 2006.

In February 2006, Globix helped Romeike further extend its client offering. Running on the 22 HP servers installed at the Globix London data centre is CommSource, a full relationship management solution enabling organisations to manage and co-ordinate their campaigns and media strategy. CommSource is the UK’s first enterprise solution to fully integrate media contacts, media coverage and breaking news to enable communications professionals to plan, implement and manage multiple campaigns and share results from a central source.

“The launch of CommSource created problems for Romeike in terms of capacity planning. It was not certain how much processing power or bandwidth this range of new services would require to run effectively. To cover this, we introduced regular performance reviews enabling us to decide, together, what the evolving capacity requirements would be,” explained Paul Court, Operations Director, Globix UK.

“The option to install new servers would not be a problem. Our sophisticated high density capabilities ensure that we don’t have any of the power and cooling issues faced by many other hosting providers. In terms of bandwidth management, we suggested a simple and cost- effective solution, advising Romeike to take the smallest bandwidth package available, but with a burstable allowance that could be switched on during major peaks in traffic without causing disruption to the service,” continued Paul.

“This is exactly the level of service we have come to expect from Globix. We decide a strategy together and whatever is needed, Globix can perform a simple upgrade at any time to ensure service optimisation,” said Neil.

According to Neil: “We couldn’t provide our clients with the levels of service they require without the support of Globix. Romeike’s strength lies in the maintenance and delivery of content. The success of our business is based on our clients’ ability to access this content 24 hours a day. Globix provides us with the resources to guarantee our infrastructure is monitored and managed around the clock, so that any potential issues are identified and rectified before they become a problem. Globix provides a level of resilience, security and support that would be prohibitively expensive for us to reproduce internally.”

Following the successful migration of its client facing infrastructure, and the launch of Mediadisk 2006 and CommSource, Romeike is planning to expand its relationship with Globix.

A new group of servers is currently being installed at the Globix data centre. These will host the media monitoring services for Romeike International, a division of Romeike’s parent company Observer AB Group that provides data intensive, cross border monitoring of multiple content feeds for large corporate clients.

“High availability is the name of the game for us and our clients. We are dealing with the media from all sides and the media can be a very unforgiving player. Our clients need to know that we are providing them with the best service available. Globix has proven that it is the perfect partner to enable us to do this. It provides us with a highly resilient and reliable infrastructure, which enables us to deliver a highly resilient and reliable portfolio of internet-based media communications management solutions,” concluded Neil.