Welsh Rugby Union implements Mimecast to support Six Nations

The WRU's Craig Phillips talks to Computing about the IT at Cardiff's Millennium Stadium

The Welsh Rugby Union (WRU) has invested in Mimecast's unified, web-based email system to help support the management of all its electronic communications, as part of its management of the Six Nations Rugby Union tournament.

Computing caught up with Welsh Rugby Union's (WRU) head of IT Craig Phillips.

"The Mimecast solution gives us the ability to reduce the time involved in managing email quarantines, provide a continuous always-on, secure email service, and archive all email communications in a cost-effective manner," he said.

"Plus, the security benefits of spam filtering and antivirus from the cloud, means we've saved money on services we had in place before."

The IT infrastructure at the WRU's Millennium Stadium in Cardiff has expanded over the past decade and this growth has been achieved with just three full-time staff and an annual budget of around £300,000.

The back-end systems at the Millennium Stadium are all virtualised using Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualisation solution.

Phillips said that the key drivers for virtualisation included green considerations, as there is less power consumption with a virtualised environment.

The WRU invested in 10 Dell servers to support the virtualised environment. It has a Dell EqualLogic box on the network too, which offers mass storage.

The WRU has a contract with a local firm, Connect Cardiff, to supply a 100Mbit/s connection around the stadium.

"That's particularly important for press and media on event day," explained Phillips.

"We need it to serve up to 300 press and photographers who are all expecting to get news out as soon as possible, so that's a key part of our business on an event day.

"Connect Cardiff supplies a back-up solution as well, so if a link fails, we've got line-of-sight to their offices, which we use as backup should fibre go down for any reason," he added.

Another facet of the WRU's IT infrastructure is its internal ticketing system Venue Master, which is provided by online ticket purchasing provider Ticketmaster.

This enables a member of the ticketing team to handle issues of duplicate tickets on event days, and allocate tickets to customers.

"For this internal ticketing system, we're moving to a hosted solution. We've done quite a lot of the preparation for this move, but are currently waiting to sign the contract," said Phillips.

The WRU has invested in Avail's disaster recovery solution. The WRU backs up all data on a nightly basis to off-site premises, which are about 12 miles away from the stadium. "This offers the ability to use the host servers within that site and enables us to have business continuity."

The next stage for Phillips is to upgrade the WRU's Exchange server to Microsoft 2010 Exchange.

"This will probably get done around the same time as the Rugby Union World Cup, as all of the rugby teams will be out of the way and things will be quieter here," said Phillips.