Comic Relief laughing with cloud computing

Comic Relief has turned to cloud computing to make sure its web and transaction platforms can cope with the demands of Friday's Red Nose Day 2009.

The charity - which also runs Sport Relief - has been working with cloud computing company Carrenza to design a hosting platform to support the biennial fundraising event.

During the previous Red Nose Day in 2007, the organisation took donations from around 450,000 people on the night of the TV broadcast, with the transaction system peaking at 54 donations per second. Around two-thirds of donations came via phone with the rest coming through the website.

The charity is aiming to significantly beat its 2007 total this year and will have an extra 3,000 voluntary call centre operators on the night, bringing the total to 12,000.

Charlotte Melen, web technology manager at Comic Relief, told silicon.com: "Every year we face the same type of question that normal other corporations face every three or five years when they do a major software or hardware upgrade."

"It's a balancing act between taking advantage of the latest and the best technology to increase our capability and efficiency but at the same time making sure we keep our exposure to risk to a minimum," she added.

For Comic Relief, Red Nose Day is the peak of web activity - 2007 saw the charity get around 25 per cent of its annual revenue and the vast majority of its website traffic in a single seven-hour period.

Previously Comic Relief ran the transaction system and website on donated technology for the whole year but this year Carrenza is to host the infrastructure, and scale it up for the three months running up to Red Nose Day and then subsequently scale it down in the weeks after the event.

"This year, what we were trying to do was to reduce the amount of hardware we run all year round," Melen said.

The charity will now run six server racks for around three months compared to 15 racks all year round thanks to virtualisation, significantly cutting energy use and boosting the charity's green credentials.

Carrenza has also re-engineered the infrastructure and donations database using technology donated by the likes of Cisco, HP, Oracle, VMWare and Zeus.

As well as achieving much greater resilience, Melen said the flexibility and scalability that cloud computing offers has been a major benefit.

"That's the edge that we're always pushing to become more flexible, more scalable, more able to cope with the load that we see on the night. That's part of the driving need for why we stretch the boundaries of technology every year just a little bit further," she said.