There are many things Comic Relief has become known for – red noses, social change, Lenny Henry – but IT innovation isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. However, behind the scenes, what is both a massive charity push and high profile media event also has a long history of technology trailblazing. When the time came to plan Red Nose Day 2009, it had become clear that this was no longer quite so true. Relying on donated hardware from generous vendors had come to mean sacrificing efficiency. So the Technology team at Comic Relief, was tasked with extracting the best value from donated services and finding a solution that would ensure no donation from the public could be lost.

Comic Relief made the decision to work with technical partners across the global tech sphere – including Oracle, 3PAR, Cisco and HP.  Cloud Computing specialists Carrenza, who had helped Comic Relief develop their Technology Strategy, were brought on board to manage the whole project and build a bespoke, highly secure private cloud to power what was to become Comic Relief’s biggest ever digital campaign.  

The project took six months and involved close collaboration with Comic Relief’s technical and corporate partners. The scope of the project covered consulting on systems architecture and operational processes, the design and build of the hosting platform and the operation and management of the platform before and during the campaign.

In six months, Carrenza:

•    Virtualised the whole Comic Relief hosting environment
•    Introduced new corporate partners, including Paypal and 3Par
•    Re-engineered the three critical business systems
•    Deployed these re-engineered systems to the virtualised hosting platform

A scalable, virtualised, hosting and development platform was provided for Comic Relief’s developers, using LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP). For the separate donations platform, the existing Java and Oracle platform was completely re-engineered to include Oracle Database 11g in a stretched RAC cluster, Active Dataguard and Oracle BIEE, the first time this configuration of Oracles flagship database had been put into live production.

The Red Nose Day website is a primary fundraising and donation portal, so it was really crucial that it kept full functionality regardless of visitor numbers. That seven hour period sees the vast majority of Comic Relief’s annual website traffic - downtime is not an option. As a result, in the run up to the event, Carrenza’s technical team worked with Comic Relief’s developers to scale the open-source content management system (CMS) Drupal to make it a better fit for enterprise-level use on Rednoseday.com’s community site. This led to the highest traffic Drupal deployment ever, with the LAMP site pushing over 600Mbps of traffic on donation night.

Key Achievements

In terms of sheer scale, Red Nose Day 2009 was one of the world’s largest online events, smashing its targets to rise over £82 million for some of world’s poorest countries of which more than £20 million flowed through the new platform, all without a moment’s downtime.

The peak in traffic was 116 transactions per second at one point (over double last’s Red Nose Day peak of 54 tps) with more than 540,000 transactions taken securely via the website and call centre over the seven hour period, with 12,000 call centre volunteers using the same platform to process payments.

As a case in point for the evolution of this technology into a highly secure, scalable environment, Comic Relief’s migration to the cloud represents a mammoth achievement for all the partners and technicians involved. Through collaboration, individuals across all parties were able to break through technical barriers to achieve genuine world-firsts, pushing Cloud Computing technology to places it has never been before.