Comic Relief announces Red Nose Day 2011 technology partners
Howard Lake | 3 February 2011 | News
The technical support for Comic Relief’s Red Nose Day will this year be provided by Carrenza, Oracle, Cisco, HP, PayPal, VMware, WorldPay and Zeus Technology.
Comic Relief runs two core platforms with enterprise IT ‘over-the-cloud’ supplier Carrenza, a core websites platform and a donation platform. The donation platform uses a Java application backed by a stretched Oracle Real Application Clusters environment that runs across two data centres. This enables Comic Relief to cope with the intense spike of giving activity when its website and callcentres process hundreds of thousands of donations within just a few hours.
The core websites platform supports all Comic Relief websites including www.rednoseday.com and www.comicrelief.com. The websites are all built using Drupal, the open source CMS, and are one of the largest Drupal installations in the UK. They run on a scalable LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack, also open source, .
Both platforms use VMware vSphere 4 for virtualisation and sit on HP ProLiant BL460 blade servers with HP 3PAR T-Class Storage Systems. Security, switching and smooth traffic management are handled at the front by Cisco 6500-series networking (including ACE and FWSM modules) and Zeus Technology. PayPal and WorldPay provide secure payment processing at the back end.
This year’s solution builds on Red Nose Day’s set up for 2009, which won a UK IT Industry Award for cloud computing platform.
www.rednoseday.com
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About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.