Sports Relief relieved

As you sit and watch Sports Relief on TV in a couple of weeks’ time, perhaps making a donation via credit card, spare a thought for what is going on behind the scenes. And in particular, what is happening to your donation and personal details.

Out of sight, cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider, Carrenza, will be delivering IT management services and resources for the sixth time to Comic Relief’s Sport Relief campaign.

Since 2008 Carrenza has donated over £2.5 millions-worth of infrastructure services and consultancy to Comic Relief to help ensure each Sport Relief and Red Nose Day campaign is a success. Core Comic Relief systems, including those handling donations, activity sign-ups and key back office functions will be hosted on Carrenza's Infrastructure-as-a-Service environment.

Phil Latham, Head of Future Media and Technology at Comic Relief says: “Carrenza have helped us to develop an evolved and more flexible cloud strategy that allows us to make use of the best solution for each business and technical challenge, helping us to maximise the income we generate during each campaign. We are delighted that we are continuing to work with Carrenza for Sport Relief 2014 and we thank them for their continued support and generosity in ensuring that each campaign is a success.”

Within Carrenza services, reliability and scalability allow the accurate replication critical for ensuring the ability to scale from a few to hundreds of servers in minutes, rapidly deploying both applications and the underlying compute resource.

This provides Comic Relief with the elasticity and reliability it needs to deliver on the unprecedented high levels of demand it’s likely to experience on the night. In previous years it had a peak of over 250 credit card transactions per second, which the company claims is five times as many transactions as Amazon Retail experienced on Cyber Monday.

“Our support of Comic Relief goes beyond a purely commercial relationship,” said Dan Sutherland, CEO at Carrenza. “As a team and as a company we believe in what they do, and we are hugely proud of the small part we play in helping them achieve their goals.

"This year we are also helping raise money by taking part in the Sainsbury's Sport Relief Cycle. Carrenza staff have formed a team to raise money by cycling 50 miles. Many of the team have never attempted anything like this before, for them it is a real challenge."