Sport Relief 2006 is using grid computing technology to ensure its web infrastructure can deal with tens of thousands of anticipated donations.
The fund-raising day on 15 July will culminate in a live BBC broadcast. It is expected that 90,000 donations will be made in the 10-minute period at the start of the 10pm news alone.
Grid technology from Oracle is being used to ensure that Sport Relief’s IT system can handle donations made via phone, the internet and Sky Interactive.
‘The main challenge is that we have just one night, during five hours of live television, to get it right,’ said Martin Gill, head of new media at Sport Relief. ‘Every minute we are not up and running is pounds lost.’
Sport Relief is using Oracle’s 10g Enterprise Edition database, Real Application Clusters and
Enterprise Manager 10g, and Fusion Middleware, all of which will run on Sun Microsystems servers, with connectivity from Pipex and Cisco.
Gill says the grid technology will allow Sport Relief to deal with spikes in donations.
‘In the past we had to build considerable, slow-to-deploy redundancy into the system to handle the extra strain on our system on Sport Relief and Red Nose days. We also needed a team of 17 administrators to babysit the system when donations hit their peak in the evening of Sport Relief,’ said Gill.
‘The grid model is more automated. We can monitor use of resources more accurately and allocate resources dynamically, steering spare capacity to other services. With a global view, we can decrease the number of people needed on-site.’
Sport Relief can analyse traffic in real time to see what television item – such as a particular documentary – is raising the most money, and repeat it.
Testing has been essential in the run-up to the day, and two disaster recovery sites have also been set up.
‘Through testing we have improved efficiency on the Java application side, which can be memory-intensive if not made efficient,’ said Gill.
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