Comic Relief web site gears up for Red Nose Day

Comic Relief wants no surprises from its IT

A day before Red Nose Day 2009, Comic Relief's IT team is gearing up for "an event that we hope is bigger than ever this year," according to Comic Relief web technology manager Charlotte Melén.

The last Red Nose Day in 2007 saw more than 450,000 people donate through the web platform on the fundraising night alone.

"Comic Relief gets 25 per cent of its annual revenue and the vast majority of its web site traffic, in just the seven-hour period when the TV event is being transmitted – 7pm to around 2am," said Melén.

Since the web site is the primary fundraising and donation portal, Melén said it is crucial to retain full functionality regardless of visitor numbers and ensure there is no downtime.

"We need 100 per cent uptime during event day, so we have to have redundancy at every level. The challenge comes from the type of traffic we experience – it's very peaky and bursty, so the technology has to be able to handle this," she said.

To plan for the traffic volumes experienced during the event, traffic up to three times larger than that planned for has to be simulated on the donations platform. Melén said Comic Relief faced a yearly upgrade strategy that is comparable to a large corporate's three-to-five yearly upgrade cycle.

Hosting provider Carrenza helped develop Comic Relief's web and donations platforms, which are physically separate and run on different technology stacks. The public web sites are handled through a virtualised hosting and development platform using Linux operating systems, Apache web server, MySQL database and the dynamic web scripting language PHP - a combination of technologies commonly termed LAMP.

The back-end storage infrastructure was built using 3Par's InServ T-Class virtualised storage arrays, designed to handle 1.4 million transactions coming from either the Red Nose Day web site or the 12,000-seat call centre. Application virtualisation is handled by VMware software running on HP BladeSystem technology.

For the donations platform, Carrenza used Comic Relief's existing Java and Oracle platform, and re-engineered it to include an Oracle 11g database in an expanded Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) database platform.

Melén said that Comic Relief's hopes were to "scale up accordingly to match our needs - without needing great swathes of hardware sitting there all year."

She said collaboration with its developers allowed Comic Relief to "flexibly scale the open-source content management system, Drupal, to make it fit for enterprise-level use on our community site – this is another first."