Food agency beefs up site for peak demand

The Food Standards Agency (FSA) is using a utility computing model to ensure its web site stays operational during a major food scare.

The technology, which consists of hosted network, storage, and computer architecture, is allowing the independent government department to rapidly increase bandwidth as demand increases, and to deal with spikes in web traffic automatically.

Last year’s Sudan 1 crisis, when a carcinogenic dye was found in a number of popular food products, led to a record number of people accessing the FSA web site, almost causing it to crash, says David Payne, the FSA’s managing web editor.

‘That was the biggest incident to date, with a large list of products affected,’ he said. ‘The web site was close to going down and lessons were learned about the need to make it more resilient.

‘We can’t predict when incidents will occur and traffic will spike, so we must be able to boost service at short notice.’

The FSA is now paying for the bandwidth it uses on a pay-as-you-go basis, allowing it to increase usage at peak times and pay accordingly.

‘Our investment in utility computing helps guarantee on-demand access to critical information on food and health safety without the high costs of secure hosted services,’ he said.

Vendor Savvis, which already provides managed and outsourced IT to the FSA, is providing the utility services.

The FSA is also establishing a disaster recovery centre in the US to ensure continued service in the event of a major incident in the UK.

‘Having robust disaster recover strategies means that if anything awful were to happen, we could switch to our set-up in the US and still put information out,’ said Payne.

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Further reading

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