Online lottery gears up for last-minute surge

Chariot, the company behind the new online national lottery game Monday, has awarded a web site and transaction hosting contract to vendor Colt.

The charity-backed lottery will hold its first draw on 8 May, supported by a data centre infrastructure that will handle some two million transactions totalling £10m in weekly ticket sales.

Network services such as switch, load balancing management and full server management with 24/7 monitoring and support services are essential to the lottery’s success, says Sajjad Ahmed, chief technology officer at Chariot.

‘With 99.9 per cent of sales via the internet we had to deploy a high-availability infrastructure with backup for everything, resilience in the network infrastructure and applications,’ he said.

It has taken just three months for Colt to put the Monday infrastructure in place. The 36-month contract covers change control and problem management.

Ahmed says predicting spikes in demand has proved tricky, and the organisation looked at online lotteries in other countries to establish a model.

‘We did intelligent work looking at how other countries see the load on their infrastructure. We have planned for the maximum load to take 60 per cent of sales in the last day,’ he said.

Colt will provide a range of security mechanisms including firewalls, intruder detection and denial-of-service protection.

‘We want the customer to have the same level of confidence as using eBay and Amazon, and we have used tried and tested, industry-standard software that people are familiar with,’ said Ahmed.

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