For one night of the year Comic Relief operates one of the busiest e-commerce sites in the world.  By 2007, the anticipated number of transactions will put great pressure on the organisations’ infrastructure to enable supporters to come onto the site, donate in real time and navigate away with no snags or delays.  In five short hours, Comic Relief brings in funds which are the equivalent of two good pre-Christmas days’ sales for a major online retailer.  Resilient infrastructure is vital as just 15 minutes of downtime on Red Nose Day could mean a loss of more than £600,000.

“Six years ago, Comic Relief made a strategic decision to use digital technologies to drive fundraising and communications with our supporter community.” says Martin Gill, Head of New Media and the man responsible for online and mobile activities.  “At the time, this was considered an unusual move, but by being an early adopter it enabled us to differentiate Comic Relief from other organisations.  It also enabled us to communicate personally with a wider, perhaps untapped audience in a way we could never have afforded with offline media.”

“We constantly strive to keep Comic Relief fresh and appealing.  We’re very fortunate that our Trustees and Directors have a progressive outlook towards digitial technology.  Digital media helps us to be innovative and interesting in the ways that we draw attention to the projects and partners with which Comic Relief works – this is especially important as we try to support projects which ordinarily find it hard to raise funding.”

Comic Relief is also unusual in that the organisation has its own infrastructure, which is hosted in two data centres by Pipex.  The benefit is that by doing so, the organisation has the flexibility to be opportunistic in the way it gets involved in campaigns.  So, in addition to running Red Nose Night on a biennial basis, they’ve also been involved in signing up 670,000 supporters to Make Poverty History, delivering over 1.5 million emails to Tony Blair, collecting 38 million signatures on the LIVE 8 LIST and registering over 115,000 Milers for Sport Relief in the last year.

Martin Gill continues, “We depend on hardware, software and infrastructure to be enterprise level, robust and scalable.  Central to our work is our relationship with best-of-breed technology partners - including APC, Cisco Systems, Oracle, Pipex and Sun Microsystems. We need the support of committed parties, interested in both technical excellence and making the world a better place.  I believe the tech sector has led the way regarding companies stepping up to the plate to be pioneering good corporate citizens.  For example, environmental concerns have become a big issue and both Sun and APC demonstrate a real commitment to energy efficiency with their solutions.”

The generosity of technology partners helps Comic Relief to keep its promises to the public.  Says Martin Gill, “Everything we do must support the Comic Relief Promise – that for every pound donated directly by the public to Comic Relief, we will give a pound to the projects we support.  Our technology partners help us deliver that promise, which in turn means that our donors can be confident their money is getting to the places in the UK and around the world where it can do the most good.”

“However, being a charity is no excuse to be second class.  All supporters or donors have very high expectations of digital offerings, driven by the myriad range of fantastic e-commerce and community sites across the Internet. We work hard to gain supporters’ involvement and aim to give them a real sense of making a difference.” continues Gill.  Technology has helped in this process, but Comic Relief always wants to push out the boundaries and Red Nose Day in 2007 is expected to break all records.  “We’re expecting between 700,000 and 800,000 transactions on the night, with 30 minutes of critical time around the ten o clock news when digital activities peak.”

“With an average online donation of £36, it is essential that supporters can come to the site, donate securely and navigate away without any snags. During this time the infrastructure and database is being accessed by a large number of concurrent users.  Not only that, we’re trying to eliminate multiple or fraudulent transactions and ensure that the entire system is fully secure.”

“Good equipment is vital to us.”  Martin Gill explains.  “APC has recently supplied and installed an InfraStruXure solution including a 5kW UPS, equipment racks and power distribution units at Pipex’s Harbour Exchange data centre. The Sun web and database servers and Cisco equipment which we have vary greatly in size, power requirement and heat output.  The dimensions of APCs’ NetShelter SX cabinets, combined with its universal fitting kits, means that we can operate a heterogeneous environment with full confidence that our equipment can be housed together in the same rack.”

“InfraStruXure® addresses many of the emerging trends and issues data centres face today by incorporating new features and benefits that enable a more effective IT environment.  The cabinets feature increased depth combined with effective cable management and power distribution.  Although we’re not using blade servers, we’re still aware that increasing power densities have led to a need for enclosures that provide superior ventilation.  NetShelter features perforated panels on front and rear doors, meaning that when appropriate we can increase density without the need to replace housings.”

“APC’s InfraStruXure architecture for on-demand data centres, means we can build upon the components we hold to deploy our own high density data centre.  In the meantime, we can enjoy features like the rear ‘french’ door openings, which allow full access to cable and power management without blocking data centre aisles.”

Martin Gill concludes “Comic Relief infrastructure, from servers, software and switches to security and cabling is critical to our success.  Without the support and commitment of partners like APC, we would not be able to work so well towards fulfilling our mission of to help end poverty and social injustice in the UK and the poorest countries in the world,”