Gooners get better online service from Arsenal

Arsenal push more fans through virtual turnstile

Premier League football club web sites, especially those of global brands like Arsenal, can be subject to large spikes in network traffic demand, especially since such traffic can arrive from all corners of the planet.

Arsenal has been one of the top four clubs in the Premier League for the past 13 years, and have won the championship three times during that time.

So the club needs a reliable platform for its central portal Arsenal.com, giving round-the-clock availability, and enough power to service requests for static web pages as well as dynamic content, such as streaming video.

The ultimate responsibility for keeping such a high profile web site up and running falls to Arsenal Broadband Limited (ABL) - a joint venture between Arsenal FC PLC and US-based Kroenke Sports Enterprises. The cost of not being able to do this would be significant brand damage, with associated digital revenue loss.

When ABL head of technology Trevor Diamond joined the business four years ago the incumbent relationship was with Sky through its planetfootball.com site. " They were good guys, but the platform we were using really had become long in the tooth and rather outdated – especially the content management system (CMS), " explained Diamond.

"We decided to look around for another platform, especially since Sky were pulling out of the business of doing football club web sites – there wasn’t even an offer on the table. Basically, they were getting out and we needed to move on," said Diamond.

What ABL needed was a company that had experience in, or already built, a specialist sports CMS, and also a hosting partner. "We talked to a number of players and settled on a company called Rippleffect from Liverpool. They were running the Everton web site and we were very impressed with the capabilities of their technical people and their attitudes," said Diamond.

Rippleffect suggested ABL use NTT Europe Online to host the Arsenal.com site. Diamond said that ABL needed to "own the relationship with NTT, rather than going through Rippleffect".

"So we selected NTT and Rippleffect, with the server configuration to be used being designed by a combination of myself and an ABL technical specialist, an architect at NTT, and also specialists from Rippleffect – collaborative design – if you like," said Diamond.

At the minute the system ABL is using consists of seven servers, with four configured as web servers and two database servers. The seventh server is a media server that is used, "to serve up low volume, miscellaneous media items – like podcasts."

Explaining how the system works, Diamond said: "NTT's content delivery network (CDN) fronts up the system, so when you browse to Arsenal.com, you’re not talking to our servers, but to NTT's CDN, which is served out of its Frankfurt, London, Madrid and Paris datacentres."

NTT's system figures out which point of presence (POP) customers need to give them the best performance, said Diamond. "What that means is that our servers only end up picking up five per cent of the traffic, with NTT's CDN taking 95 per cent of the load, although our servers could pick up the whole of the network traffic," added Diamond. "We’re prepared to pay to do it this way, because it’s such a vital internet property."

The advantages for ABL is that they have complete technical access to the servers, with massive redundancy, "any three of the four web servers could fail and we should be able to carry on - similarly if one of the two database servers went down," said Diamond.

"NTT are responsive to support tickets and we have easy access to their senior technical and management people. For the future we have a couple of years on the contract and I’m sure I’ll be pushing them [NTT] on price," added Diamond.