Case Study: Comic Relief achieves 100% uptime and elastic scalability with Riverbed Stingray Traffic Manager

Comic Relief Goes Cloud Computing with the Help of Riverbed Technology

Comic Relief, the UK charity behind Red Nose Day, relies on its website as the primary donations portal and needed to improve on its 2007 performance for the high-traffic seven-hour broadcast event in 2009. The IT challenge was to build a virtual web infrastructure that could absorb extreme, bursty traffic while maintaining 100% uptime and cutting the amount of hardware running year-round.

Working with Carrenza and using donated technologies—most notably Riverbed Stingray Traffic Manager as a virtual appliance on VMware—the charity virtualized its stack (reducing 15 always-on racks to six racks hosting 60–80 VMs), enabling fast scaling, real-time performance monitoring and robust redundancy. The platform was implemented in hours, delivered 100% uptime during the event, handled more than 1 GB of traffic (a 242% increase), processed over 540,000 online transactions with peaks of 116 tps, and helped raise £54.7 million.

Comic Relief

Christian Riley

Technical Consultant