The National Lottery web site has handled record rates of lottery ticket sales following the expansion of its systems architecture and installation of virtualisation technology.

On 17 November the EuroMillions jackpot reached £123m, and the site processed 28,013 new registrations while online sales hit £500,000 an hour, some 19 per cent above the previous peak of £417,000 per hour.

Neil Kellar, Camelot IT director, says big jackpots always bring a surge in web site use, and the firm has increased its capacity several times to cope with the extra demand.

‘We have doubled our capacity across all major components of our web architecture, including business continuity. Our approach was to scale up and scale out, using a predictive capacity model,’ he said.

The site uses IBM’s Power5 virtualisation technology to improve flexibility for applications and to pool processor resources.

‘By weighting each application according to its importance, we can seamlessly and automatically respond to peaks in demand by assigning more computing power to the systems that need it most,’ said Kellar.

He says that capacity was increased in periodic upgrades rather than a big bang approach to help spread investment, monitor actual growth against forecast and give Camelot the ability to react should other channel opportunities emerge.

‘What we have to do is balance the creation of a scalable solution that minimises business risk and meets the strategy of growing the channel with the cost of ownership and the need for speed to market,’ he said.

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