3par Goes the Extra Mile for Sport Relief

3PAR, Inc. has provided the backend storage infrastructure to support the transaction processing engine built for Comic Relief‘s fundraising campaign Sport Relief.

This highly virtualized cloud computing infrastructure was built on 3PAR InServ T-Class Storage Servers with help from Comic Relief technology partner and 3PAR customer Carrenza Hosting. Carrenza and 3PAR came together to assist Comic Relief in processing $29 million in online charitable contributions for Red Nose Day in 2009. The joint technology donation from 3PAR and Carrenza for Sport Relief is intended to support peak Web traffic and donations collected via the Sport Relief Website now and during the Sport Relief Weekend, which takes place from Friday, March 19th to Sunday, March 21st.

Charlotte Melen, Web Technology Programme Manager for Comic Relief, comments: "Since its launch in 2002, millions of people have taken part in Sport Relief, helping to raise over £80 million. Generous contributions from technical partners like 3PAR and Carrenza not only provide the infrastructure that makes our online donations possible, but which allows us to minimize operating expenses so that money can go where it is needed most."

As with Red Nose Day in 2009, to supplement the InServ T-Class Storage Server already deployed at Carrenza, 3PAR has donated an additional 3PAR InServ T-Class Storage Server to support Comic Relief’s cloud-based infrastructure during peak campaign time. To handle the anticipated traffic increase during the run-up to and during the Sport Relief Weekend, Carrenza again chose to build a transaction processing engine using 3cV, a proven blueprint for highly virtualized utility computing that combines 3PAR Utility Storage with HP BladeSystem c-Class server blades and server virtualization software from VMware.

"We had great success using 3PAR as the primary storage technology for Red Nose Day 2009," said Dan Sutherland, CEO of Carrenza Hosting. "With help from 3PAR, we aided Comic Relief in taking in more than a half million donation transactions over a period of just seven hours – triple the amount of traffic supported on the evening of the previous Red Nose Day in 2007 and double the peak traffic ever experienced by the event."

Sport Relief is a fundraising event organised by Comic Relief every two years in order to bring the UK together to get active, raise cash, and change lives. Funds raised have made a difference to the lives of thousands of people across Africa and the UK who face terrible injustice or live in poverty.

"We are extremely excited to follow up on the success of Red Nose Day 2009 by supporting the Sport Relief campaign," said David Scott, President and CEO for 3PAR. "We have seen the advent of cloud computing begin to transform the datacenter. In partnership with Comic Relief and Carrenza, we hope that the cloud computing infrastructure we have built for Sport Relief will help to transform lives."