Sport Relief
In 2002 we worked with a team of partners including Cisco, Sun, Oracle, Energis, WorldPay, Macromedia, BBCi, BBC Technology, Navyblue and Saviso to complete a build on one of the most sophisticated multi-channel commerce platforms in the world.
The system was designed to take donations from Internet and satellite interactive TV and was the first UK online donations carried out in tandem with a television program.
We designed the application and platform to cope with massive traffic peaks and to be able to store the donations locally when the amount of donations exceeded the capabilities of the banks involved.
Building a platform designed to cope with the high bandwidth users on the Internet as well as the incredible traffic spikes generated from a live calls to action from the television show presented some unique challenges.
The team at Can Factory have been working with high traffic peaks sites for over ten years which include Inteflora, Early Learning Centre, Argos and Marks & Spencer. Each of the sites has their own types of traffic spikes whether on Valentine’s Day for Interflora or a Christmas shopping peak for a retailer. We compiled all of this learning and pride ourselves on building platforms that are guaranteed to take transactions, registration or general content delivery throughout any campaign.
One of the unique challenges that Sport or Comic Relief face is that they have only one chance to get it right. Unlike most commerce sites, that can ask their customers to come back later, the amount of donations that happen during the show would be drastically reduced if the site was down for even an hour. Red Nose Day last year saw the site take over 25,000 donations in less than fifteen minutes: If the platform was not available for any reason during those fifteen minutes, the amount of money raised would have been significantly less.
The platform was built on multiple networks, using a pool of load balanced Sun V480 web servers, with dual power supplies, dual 2 GB Internet connectivity, dual Sun V880 database servers and dual backup generators to ensure that there was no single point of failure in the hardware platform. Cisco provided us with a ground breaking network environment which was developed in conjunction with the team specifically for this platform.