Red Nose Day site goes live...

The latest Red Nose Day charity campaign kicked off last Friday, with the website playing a more important role in helping raise funds than ever before.

The site runs on Sun's Sun Fire V1280 server, making Comic Relief - the charity behind Red Nose Day - the first UK organisation to use the product.

The V1280 is held in a different location from the Red Nose Day campaign primary data site, and according to Sun will serve two main functions: to provide greater capacity than its predecessors to meet the expected increase in demand, and to duplicate the entire web server infrastructure for disaster recovery purposes.

Martin Gill, Comic Relief's new media fundraising manager, said: "The site is capable of taking 200 transactions per second and we hope that rednoseday.com will receive more hits than ever on the evening of Red Nose Day on 14 March... The site will be capable of taking a record-breaking amount of donations as well as managing a huge spike in traffic in response to key moments of live BBC One programming."

Michael Avis, marketing director, Sun Microsystems, added: "Dynamic reconfiguration means processors and memory can be replaced or added without having to bring the server down - this is vital as the Red Nose Day campaign demands continuous web site availability."