Case Study: Managing the extremities - September 2006  

S&T looks at how the packed sports events diary of the UK summer has kept specialist web development and hosting provider Coreware even more busy than usual.

Hosting a number of online services over the 2006 FIFA World Cup period produced a new record for Coreware in terms of peak demand, with an estimated 10m page impressions per hour being seamlessly delivered through Coreware’s London-based data centre operations, equating to a peak bandwidth demand of some 320 megabits per second. In the meantime, it was business as usual with the Wimbledon tennis championships and more recently the domestic soccer season underway once again. Coreware’s extensive experience in the delivery of high profile sports events websites has ensured the company is able to cope with the extremes this unusual type of hosting can demand from both a content and hosting perspective.

Microsite creation

“Our ability to integrate content and multiple statistics feeds into a single event website is now down to smooth operation,” said Tobias Russell, MD of Coreware. “For example, we were able to produce Reuter’s Wimbledon and US Open Microsites in a matter of days and they were easily added to our hosting platform for delivery to online users.” The key aspect of Coreware’s sports Microsite creation is the ability to not only handle the various incoming editorial and picture feeds but also those of the appropriate statistics suppliers.
Coreware has extensive experience in integrating feeds from Infostrada, Opta and the notoriously tricky data feeds from IOC. This makes it very easy for content producers to provide a ‘website out of a box’ to third parties for any event they think will generate interest, with the key selling point being that the Microsite will require virtually no input from the buyer to seamlessly integrate the event website into their own online offering apart from some adjustments for look and feel issues. Furthermore, Coreware can also offer a range of enhanced community features that help build an online community and hence the all important ‘eyeballs’ during the course of an event, including blogs, polls and quizzes, as well as fantasy league and predictor games.

Hosting platform

Coreware’s hosting platform is designed to be able to quickly scale to any event thrown at it. For the 2006 FIFA World Cup for example, Coreware’s server cluster was extended to 24 individual machines, all sitting behind redundant load balancers which ensured that no single machine got over-loaded with page requests, thus delivering a user experience during the event was as smooth and as up to date as possible.
To ensure reliability and redundancy, Coreware’s hosting platform uses no less than five upstream suppliers, all connected via gigabit feeds which not only ensures a massive amount of capacity is available but also, vitally, redundancy. “What we fully understand is that any outage during a live sports event is a total disaster,” said Russell, “whilst a brief outage for a regular website is not desirable, it is survivable, whereas for a sports event losing even a few seconds of play has a significant and severe impact. Users will very quickly switch to either another website or media to keep abreast of play.”
The other key challenge to manage is the sheer swings in volumes seen during sports events. As the first graph illustrates, bandwidth usage over the 2006 FIFA World Cup was some 500% up on average (that is excluding shorter term peaks) than the quieter days experienced during August for example.

To illustrate the ‘peaky’ nature of this type of hosting, the second graph shows a typical weekend’s coverage where several short term peaks can be seen, coinciding with the various match times of the various leagues being covered.
For example, coverage over the weekend of the 26-28 August 2006 included both UK Premier League and Spanish La Liga and the different times of the matches in each region can be clearly seen, with the biggest peak on Saturday afternoon when both leagues were live at the same time, but the evening Spanish games also stand out.

Indeed the weekend illustrated was slightly unusual being a Bank Holiday in the UK, but the Monday night game between Celto Vigo and Barcelona on the opening weekend for La Liga shows a very clear pattern (on the third graph) of increasing traffic during the game followed by an abrupt and sharp end of online interest in the event at 10pm, BST.

Life beyond sport?

One benefit of meeting the needs of such a demanding customer base is that Coreware’s hosting platform is now ideally placed to meet all types of hosting customers, especially those for whom reliability and availability are paramount. “Whereas our hosting platform was originally built around the needs of our development customers we are finding increasing interest from other industries such as e-commerce for example,” said Russell. “It seems that the discipline imposed on us by one of the most demanding hosting environments is now being recognised by others.”
After several years of development, Coreware has built a highly robust and scalable hosting platform which can handle some of the biggest and most demanding sporting events the industry can throw at it. Furthermore, the company’s use of open source software and its ability to pick and choose from the best data centre and upstream network providers gives the company not only enhanced redundancy but also a cost effective approach, meaning best in class service doesn’t have to cost ridiculous sums. “With 24 hour monitoring and support and a platform we know can deliver, we are optimistic not only will our development clients continue to benefit from a world class service but other third party organisations as well,” concluded Russell.

For further information visit www.coreware.co.uk or contact tim@coreware.co.uk, tel: +44(0)1483 894158.

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