allhomes.com.au

Background:
allhomes.com.au is the most popular real estate web portal in Australia's capital region. Since being launched in 2000 it had grown to service around 40,000 unique site customers and 1.4 million page views each day by 2006. To support the expansion of allhomes.com.au the decision was made by All Homes Pty Ltd to have the entire technology platform re-engineered from the ground up. Agile were engaged to undertake this redevelopment in 2006. The development project was managed over 13 months and culminated in December 2007. This was a significant undertaking, constituting development of several public and subscription-access web portals that comprise the allhomes.com.au and allclassifieds.com.au platforms. The system user interface already consisted of many hundreds of dynamic screens and an array of advanced back-end functional systems (e.g., geospatial, structured data feeds, workflows, reporting, etc.). All Homes Pty Ltd demanded a contemporary solution that would provide in excess of 99.99% uptime whilst being cost effective to maintain with enterprise class scalability. This demanded a world-class systems development that included two independent data centers, replicating/distributed database servers and filesystems, and a mesh of hardware devices in redundant fail-over configurations.

Success Factors:
Agile was to architect, engineer, test and launch a complete technology platform for allhomes.com.au. The new platform was required to provide all functionality present in the legacy site and to support 2+ million page views per day performance immediately upon its initial launch. Further, the system was to be: cost effective to maintain and scale; deliver 99.99+% uptime on a 24/7/365 basis; and be constructed such that future functional extensions could be easily incorporated.

Solution Architecture:
Agile designed the new generation allhomes.com.au platform as a distributed enterprise Java system founded upon 64bit enterprise Linux servers configured on IBM Intel hardware and integrated via Foundry/Brocade networking equipment. The middleware was engineered upon the RedHat JBoss application server, with PostgreSQL providing relational database services. The infrastructure was conceived as several physical servers distributed between geographically disparate data centres. Aggressive content caching, service clustering and realtime replication of both structured (database) and unstructured (multimedia) data was engineered to ensure enterprise-class performance, robustness and scalability.

Result:
The new generation allhomes.com.au web platform was launched into full service on December 2007. The infrastructure and software stack has proven extremely resilient, maintaining very rapid response times under loads of 50+ page impressions per second. Agile continues to be retained by All Homes Pty Ltd for 24/7 platform operations and ongoing platform development.

Posted at 10:19PM Oct 15, 2009 by agilist in Case Studies  |  Comments[0]