With the lead up to Comic Relief’s Red Nose Day 2009, the charity turned to Cloud Computing and Zeus Technology’s application traffic management software to make sure its web and donation platforms could scale up to the vast peaks of website traffic. Zeus software provided us with a scalable, robust web infrastructure giving us fast response times and 100% uptime which were critical to the success of this fundraising event.
The charity realized its needs were getting beyond the limitations of hardware
Every two years, one of the biggest events in the UK fundraising calendar is Comic Relief’s Red Nose Day. The charity raises tens of millions of pounds in donations through their website, which is the primary fundraising and donation portal. It is therefore crucial to have full functionality during peak periods and to ensure there is absolutely no downtime.
The charity’s IT team looked to improve on its 2007 performance but in doing so, faced a critical business decision of how to upgrade their IT infrastructure. The challenge was to create a virtual web infrastructure to handle the different types of traffic which continuously peaks and bursts during the seven hour TV show and to maintain 100% uptime, whilst reducing the amount of hardware running all year round.
The charity realized its needs were getting beyond the limitations of the hardware they had and were keen to take advantage of the latest and best technology to increase our capability and efficiency,” explains Charlotte Melén, Comic Relief’s Web Technology Manager.
Cloud was the logical choice
Carrenza hosts the infrastructure and helped develop Comic Relief’s web and donations platforms, using technology donated by the likes of Zeus, Cisco, HP, Oracle and VMware.
“Our aim was to reduce the 15 racks of hardware which were on all year round, yet outside the big compaign, were hardly used. So it was logical to move to virtualized machines, enabling us to run six server racks containing 60 to 80 virtual machines to support the web payment front end, which was also used by 12,000 call centre operators to take donations,” Melén says.
“We can now scale up for the three months running up to Red Nose Day and then scale it back down in the weeks after the event, so Virtualisation has created enormous benefits with huge savings on capital investment and operating costs, energy and administrative time.
“Migrating to Cloud Computing seemed a natural progression for us, as we can now manage the huge peaks of traffic which needed elasticity between platform and applications. Our web infrastructure has much greater resilience, total flexibility and scalability as well as being designed for redundancy, with no single point of failure.”
Zeus helps power the fundraising drive
“We decided to upgrade to Zeus’ ZXTM VA software running on a VMware virtual infrastructure, as software is more flexible and better suited for Virtualized and Cloud environments,” describes Christian Riley, Technical Consultant to Comic Relief. “We implemented and installed the software in a matter of hours and it plays a vital role in the infrastructure that supports the delivery of the rich media content, the donations section of the site, as well as the call centre applications.”
Zeus’ software provides the ability to measure the performance of the site in real-time and will help ensure that it is highly available during peak periods. It also provides reporting and statistical information that is key in supporting business decisions in the long-term.
Zeus was definitely the right technical partner
Riley explains, “Zeus’ ZXTM VA software fitted seamlessly with our other virtual applications, providing us with an intuitive scalable, robust infrastructure. It’s a well renowned tried and tested software solution in today’s market and since its deployment, I’m delighted that we have solved a number of technical challenges we previously couldn’t overcome.”
“It was of paramount importance that everything ran smoothly during the seven hours of intense concentration and it did just that. Zeus enabled us to scale our web capability quickly and reliably and exceeded our expectations in terms of performance and functionality needs. Just a minute of downtime would cost us dearly, so Zeus was definitely the right technical partner for us.”
And as for the results, the 2009 fundraising event exceeded 1Gb of traffic to the site, a massive 242% increase on 2007. Over 540,000 online transactions in a seven hour window with peaks of 116 transactions per second (a huge increase of 115% on 2007). With 54.7m raised on the night, these figures put into perspective the phenomenal success of Red Nose Day 2009.
Pull-out quote
“We decided to upgrade to Zeus’ ZXTM VA software running on a VMware virtual infrastructure, as software is more flexible and better suited for Virtualized and Cloud environments. We implemented and installed the software in a matter of hours and it plays a vital role in the infrastructure that supports the delivery of the rich media content, the donations section of the site, as well as the call centre applications.”
Christian Riley, Technical Consultant, Comic Relief
Technical overview
• Virtualized hosting and development platform using Linux operating systems
and Apache web server
• Application virtualization by VMware ESX 3.5 software running on HP BladeSystem technology and Java/Tomcat front end for the donations platform – both of which use Zeus ZXTM VA application traffic management software
• Six racks of hardware running on 60-80 virtual machines.
Zeus at a glance
Zeus software enables customers to create, manage and deliver exceptional online services in physical, virtual and Cloud environments. Implementing a Zeus solution allows organizations to visualize and manipulate the flow of traffic to their web-enabled applications, ensuring a consistently robust web infrastructure.
Zeus powers over one million website infrastructures across the world including, the BBC, BT, Domino’s Pizza, Gilt Groupe, ITV, I Want One of Those, Play.com, See Tickets, STA Travel, Virgin Media, WhitePages and Zoosk.
For further information, please email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or visit www.zeus.com to contact the Zeus office nearest to you.
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Comic Relief at a glance
Comic Relief was launched on Christmas Day in 1985, live on BBC One. At that time, a devastating famine was crippling Ethiopia and something had to be done. That something was Comic Relief.
The idea was simple – Comic Relief would make the public laugh while they raised money to help people in desperate need.
Before too long, Red Nose Day was created and the first ever event in 1988 raised a staggering £15m.
To date, twelve Red Nose Days have raised more than £490m. That money has helped, and is helping, to support people and communities in dire need both in the UK and Africa.
