Sport Relief 2010 announces Technical Partners
4th February 2010
Comic Relief today announces the core technology partners for its fundraising campaign Sport Relief: Carrenza Hosting, Oracle, Cisco,3PAR, HP, PayPal, VMware, RBS WorldPay and Zeus Technology.
The technical solution in place to support Sport Relief 2010 builds on last year’s hugely successful UK IT Industry Award-winning cloud computing platform, with continued emphasis on resilience and scalability.
Comic Relief operates two core platforms with Carrenza Hosting, a donation platform and a core websites platform. The donation platform consists of a highly tuned donation application built in Java backed by a stretched Oracle Real Application Clusters environment that runs active/active across 2 data-centres. Allowing Comic Relief to process hundreds of thousands of donations, via web and call centres, in just a few hours.
The core website platform supports all Comic Relief websites including www.sportrelief.com and www.comicrelief.com. The websites are all built using the open source CMS Drupal, on ascalable LAMP technology stack (one of the largest Drupal installations in the UK) with bespoke deployment procedures overcoming a well-known barrier for Drupal at the enterprise level. Both platforms use VMware vSphere4 for virtualisation and sit on HP C-class blade centres (BL680 and BL460blades) with 3PAR 400-series virtual SANs providing flexible storage. Cisco 6500-series networking (including ACE and FWSM modules) and Zeus traffic management software provide security, switching and smooth traffic management at the front whilst PayPal and RBS WorldPay provide secure payment processing at the back.