Comic Relief gets their IT systems ready for Red Nose Day

February 24, 2011

According to Computer Weekly the team responsible for organising red nose day have released some of the details about their IT infrastructure which will help to support the increase in traffic to the Comic Relief website on the 18th March.

During red nose day in 2009, comic relief processed around 116 payments per second; this is almost five times the traffic Amazon sees during its peak Christmas trading period.

To prepare Comic Relief for the traffic in 2011, the charity has called upon the expertise of some well-known technology partners to help to put in place the IT systems that it needs. It will be working with the likes of Carrenza, Oracle, Cisco, HP, PayPal, VMware, WorldPay and Zeus Technology and for the first time it will be using cloud technologies to help it to cope with the charity’s peak processing requirements.

Comic Relief is thought to be using two core platforms from Carrenza, one specifically for donation and the other for its websites. The donation platform will be using a java application in an Oracle Real Application Clusters environment across 2 data centres allowing it to process thousands of donations via the web and call centres.

The Red Nose Day and Comic Relief websites use an open source content management system called Drupal. VMware’s Vsphere 4 software is used for virtualisation and both platforms will run on a HP ProLiant BL460 blade server with HP 3PAR storage. Cisco will provide the 6500-series networking system, while Zeus Technology will support its security, switching and traffic.

Many viewers watching Comic Relief or planning to donate on the 18th March probably do not realise the full extent of the IT Operation that needs to be put in place, the day cannot be rescheduled and the IT needs to be in place to ensure it runs smoothly or else it would cause major problems which would be disastrous on the day.

The Head of new media and technologies – Marcus East from Comic Relief last year told Computer Weekly that the nature of the charity fundraising day presented them with big challenges for its IT operation.

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