Tennis federation rallies web presence

The International Tennis Federation (ITF) has beefed up its website to improve availability and speed for millions of tennis fans following the scores of Davis Cup matches online.

The ITF runs the annual Davis Cup tournament, which sees nations battling it out in the biggest annual team competition in sport.

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The ITF's website (daviscup.com) provides live scoring and statistics for up to 10 Davis Cup ties, seeing huge traffic spikes of up to six million page views per match weekend.

Mat Pemble, IT manager at the ITF, told silicon.com: "The basic problem was the sheer level of data. One of the big challenges was to find a delivery on the internet that could cope with traffic."

To cope with the increase in internet traffic the ITF has been using NTT Europe Online's Smart Content Delivery system which manages large volumes of traffic via a global network of caching servers.

The network allows bandwidth load to be spread across the various servers meaning the website can cope with the huge spikes in traffic.

Pemble said: "We've seen a steady increase in traffic to the site. We recognised we were reaching the limits of a centrally hosted site, so it was clear we had to scale up."

With 205 members and millions of website visitors Pemble said the biggest challenge is getting the data from events onto the website.

Pemble said: "The biggest benefit is having a platform we can completely rely on. We can rely on it to be there and work."

NTT Europe Online also provides a similar service to UEFA for the Champion's League football competition as well as the IAAF for last year's athletics World Championships in Osaka, Japan.