Mantra Group own the management rights to Circle on Cavill, which provides them exclusive access to the onsite letting business. While the management rights provides Mantra Group exclusive onsite letting, it does not prohibit an individual owner from renting their apartment on a short, long or permanent basis.

The accommodation business that Tailly were operating relied on individual owners providing their apartment to Tailly to manage for them or Tailly renting the apartment from a real estate agent and subsequently sub-letting the apartment to consumers. Tailly marketed, advertised and sold the private apartments using various names that were derivatives of the Circle on Cavill trade mark owned by Mantra Group.

Mantra Group claimed that the third parties in question, were deliberately infringing on the companies trade marks and set up elaborate networks of web sites specifically built, promoted and advertised to mislead and deceive consumers in an attempt to source bookings for the Tailly accommodation business.

On Friday 26th March, the Federal Court of Australia handed down a landmark judgement which relates to web sites misusing a companies trade marks. The court found that Stephen Andrew Grant and Tailly Pty Ltd had been infringing Mantra Group trade marks by owning domain names, which were identical or deceptively similar to the Circle on Cavill trade marks and by setting up web sites on those domain names to offer a service in the same category that the trade marks where registered in, was a clear violation.

John Swinson of Mallesons Stephen Jaques has provided a detailed synopsis of the ruling and its implications within the hotel and accommodation industry titled Federal Court decision enforces trade marks over internet marketing of strata-titled property.

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Due to my familiarity with what was going on, I was asked if I would be willing to provide an affidavit for the court case – which I was more than happy to do. That also meant that it was possible that I might be needed when the trial date arrived, however at the time of submitting the affidavit – that wasn’t really on my radar.

A few days before the court case was to go before the Federal Court judge in Brisbane, I was notified that I would in fact be needed during the case as a witness and would be cross examined by the party Mantra Group were up against. I’m not the sort of person that tends to get too nervous but as soon as I found out, I had butterflies in my stomach and was excited and scared by the proposition of giving evidence in a court case of this magnitude.

I arrived in Brisbane much earlier than I needed to, not that it was my intention – I simply allowed enough time in case I got hit by poor traffic from the Gold Coast to Brisbane. Just in case, I took along Always Be Testing to pass the time – turned out to be a good decision. By about 9:30AM all of the official parties started to arrive and there was lots of preparation happening within the court room – making sure the literal volumes of evidence were in order and accounted for. Legal teams have bookcases on wheels to move all of their evidence and paper work around, which they appear to prefer over builders wheelbarrow – though they carry considerably less. The first session went from around 10:00AM until 1:00PM, at which point we broke for lunch and returned just after 2:00PM. Our barrister finished off his opening statement (4.5 hours, not a bad effort) and then the opposition questioned our witness list in about an  hour and the judge called it a day. I was expecting the questioning to be quite lengthy and rigorous, attempting to disarm or discredit the evidence we had submitted against them but that didn’t appear to be their strategy on that particular day.

There were a number of things that I thought were quite interesting about the whole experience:

• The Federal Court building in Brisbane is very nice
• Apparently silence or near enough to it is a virtue, you could hear a pin drop most of the time even outside of the court room
• Barristers and other legal staff bow when entering and leaving the court room
• You can now give an oath or an affirmation to swear that you’re telling the truth. An oath can be performed over a Catholic bible, Qur’an and many others.
• Not knowing the line of questioning from a barrister is unsettling.
• Knowing the line of questioning can be unsettling as well, as you wonder why they might pursue that line of questioning in the first place and what they hope to achieve out of it further down the road.
• Court reporters can apparently hear nearly everything that happens within the court room, regardless of how softly it might be spoken. While they can record the conversation taking place are break neck pace, you still need to slow down slightly to allow them to take it down accurately.
• Instead of a barrister referring to other barristers as Mr Smith or Smith, they are referred to as ‘my learned friend’
• There are a lot of terms for various elements of a court case, evidence and processes. Due to their respective significance, barristers always use the correct name for each element to avoid confusion. However, it makes their speech patterns very different from everyday life.
• Barristers need to stand before addressing the court. When there is a lot of to-ing and fro-ing between each party and the judge, watching the barristers stand and sit is humorous.
• Only the barristers are permitted to address the court, other legal staff are not – regardless of how qualified they might be. I think even if the judge requires clarification, that will go from the other legal staff to the barrister to relay to the judge
• Barristers cannot provide documents to the judge directly, they must go through a court assistant and subsequently through an assistant for the judge.
• I think an assistant for a judge might be the most qualified personal assistant on the planet, having at least a legal degree under their belt.
• The pace of a court case can vary dramatically, from watching paint dry boring to short, sharp and quite snappy.
• Respect for one another and courtesy appear to be a requirement and highly regarded
• Judges appear to be very patient people

The whole experience has been a real eye opener for what is involved in a court case and doing a great job. While I think everyone appreciates what legal teams generally need to do – the effort they expend attempting to be as thorough and complete as possible is quite remarkable. Aspects of this case, which I was involved in were related to internet marketing. A colleague at Mantra Group and I were concerned we weren’t going to be able to adequately explain the intricacies of it to the legal folk, as it is a specialist field and quite in depth, such that they could explain it to a judge. Despite that, the ability for our senior counsel to comprehend what was going on and apply it to a different circumstance was quite impressive, especially given it isn’t something they deal in regularly or at all.

Now we just need to wait for the judge to deliver his ruling, pretty exciting!

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I was heading west on Smith Street, approaching the intersection and traffic lights of Kumbari Avenue and was increasing speed heading down the hill. The lights had been green for a little while so the dozen or so cars in front of me were all accelerating, due to the decline, green light pressure and the faster speed zone on the other side of the lights. With less than 50 metres before we cleared the intersection, the car in front of me decided to break suddenly as soon as the light went amber – when the car to his left and four more went through on the orange.

Had at least one of the minivan’s break lights been working, I would have slowed down with plenty of time to spare. However, it took another fraction of a second before I closed enough distance to realise he was breaking and aggressively.

Fortunately, I allow a little more breaking distance when driving my Ford Telstar; which has a striking similarity to a small tank and even smaller breaks!

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Following on from the financial restructuring, Stella Hospitality Group announced on Friday 14th that it was rebranding itself to Mantra Group, to further distance itself from the embattled Octaviar, previously MFS Limited.

Now I’ll need to remember to tell people I work for Mantra Group and not Stella Hospitality Group!

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The traffic was moving at about 80Km/h in this section of road and it was predicably smooth, as opposed to fast then slow. As I came over the crest of a hill and for reasons unknown, the traffic 10 cars in front of me decided to suddenly break. The heavy breaking rippled through the lane of traffic as per normal, however the two or three cars directly in front of me were caught out by the crest of the hill. To compound matters, the car directly in front of me had some issues which their break lights – specifically, breaking caused his break lights to turn off instead of on!

Night fall was upon us and everyone already had their driving lights on. With the free flowing traffic through this section of road, there wasn’t a reason for the driver in front of me to break – so I didn’t notice the reversal of his break lights earlier. Unfortunately for me, that meant I first realised something was wrong after he stomped on the break pedal to respond to the heavy breaking 10 cars in front.

As you can imagine, I was very happy that there was adequate breaking distance for my heavy little tank of a car to slow down or I’d be catching a lift to work for a while.

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As is quite common, our environment consists of multiple Oracle 10g RAC nodes connected into a shared data source. The shared data source in this instance is a SAN, where we have a whole bunch of disks configured in groups for redundancy and performance. As soon as the database administrator became involved, it became apparent that we didn’t drop a single disk but had in fact lost access to an entire group of disks within the SAN.

Due to the manner in which the SAN and Oracle are configured, we were not in a position where running in a RAID environment was going to help. If we had dropped a single disk or a subset of disks from any group within the SAN, everything would have been fine; unfortunately we dropped an entire disk group. The end result of this was that we were forced to roll back our database to the previous nights backup.

The following days have been spent recovering the lost days data through various checks and balances; but it takes a lot of time and energy from everyone involved to make this happen. We’ve been fortunate enough to trade for several years without ever needing to roll back our production database due to some sort of significant event; which I suppose we should be thankful for.

After three years without performing a production disaster recovery, had we become complacent about data restoration and recovery as haven’t really needed it before? I believe that since we haven’t had a requirement to perform a disaster recovery for some three years, that our previous data recovery guidelines have now become out of date. Whilst a daily backup may have been more than sufficient for this particular database two or three years ago, the business has undergone significant growth since that time. The daily changeset for this database is now significant enough that, whilst having a daily backup is critical – it requires significant amounts of work to recover all of the data in a moderate time frame.

As a direct result of this disaster, we’re going to be reviewing our data recovery policies shortly. The outcome of that discussion will most likely be that we require higher levels of redundancy in our environment to reduce the impact of a failure. Whilst it would be ideal to have an entire copy of our production hardware, it probably isn’t going to be a cost effective solution. I’m open to suggestions about what sort of data recovery we implement, however I think that having some sort of independent warm spare may win out.

What have we learned out of this whole event:

• daily backup of data is mandatory
• daily backup of data may not be sufficient
• verify that your backup sets are valid, invalid backup data isn’t worth the media it is stored on
• be vigilant about keeping data recovery strategies in step with business growth and expectations

Maybe periodic disasters are actually healthy for a business? Whilst every business strives to avoid any sort of down time, I expect that as a direct result of the typically high availability of certain systems that disaster recovery isn’t put through its paces often or rigorously enough; which may result in longer downtimes or complete loss of data when an actual disaster recovery is required.

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One of the interesting parts of this project involved learning how to scale an ASP.NET web application. Unlike most other pieces of development we’ve previously worked on, we didn’t have access to hardware and services that were capable of delivering smoking performance (read: Oracle 10g clustered using RAC). As a by product of the constraints which were placed on us, scaling the new web application proved a little harder than it first looked.

Over the course of the next few weeks, I’ll be posting about various steps which we’ve taken to scale our ASP.NET application. Some of the points are hinged in the physical world, others operational and of course technical as well. Items which come to mind immediately include:

• load balancers
• clustering physical servers
• clustering web servers
• web gardens
• user interface process control
• session handling
• web services & XML
• spike testing

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