Comic Relief: Laughing all the way to the Grid
Comic Relief was set up in 1985 and is based in Vauxhall, London. The charity employs about 100 staff and runs two key campaigns to help alleviate poverty both in the UK and internationally. Its flagship Red Nose Day takes place each March during odd years, with the next one being held in 2007, while Sport Relief, which began in 2002, occurs during even years.
For the last 20 years, the organisation has in the main collected money with the help of more than 14,000 call-centre volunteers using paper-based systems. This has traditionally meant that partners have taken between two and three weeks to process donations, or longer if something goes wrong.
In 1997, however, Comic Relief introduced a Web site for the first time and raised £40,000 as a result of online donations. Two years later, the figure had risen to £465,000 out of a total of £35 million, which "was the tipping point for us. The Web site moved from being nice-to-have to becoming important", according to Martin Gill, head of new media at Comic Relief.
By 2005, however, the charity had also decided to introduce a pilot project, enabling 5 percent of its call-centre operators to use the Web-based donation system rather than rely on a paper and pen. It now aims to increase uptake to between 7,000 and 9,000 of staff in 2007.
"It's quite a technical feat to build a system that can log in that many at the same time to take donations, but it would be a massive improvement for us because it would be possible to process money in real-time so that it would be in the bank the next morning. We'd also be able to notify people of any payment problems immediately and make Gift Aid claims a week after the event, not months later," says Gill.
Therefore, to enable this to take place, the organisation has implemented server virtualisation technology in the shape of a Grid-based system supplied by technology sponsors, Sun and Oracle.
Grid-based systems comprise disparate IT resources that have been networked together using middleware to create a single virtual computing infrastructure.
This enables all of the processing power of the Grid to be harnessed simultaneously to handle huge workloads no matter where individual machines happen to be located. But it also means that elements of that workload can be split off and allocated to idle CPUs in the network should others be working at full capacity.
In order to introduce Grid functionality, meanwhile, Comic Relief upgraded its existing Oracle 9i software and replaced it with the vendor's 10G database, Real Application Clusters software, Enterprise Manager management console and Fusion middleware, all running on Solaris.
Gill explains the move: "Resource utilisation and high availability are really important issues to us because we need to operate as efficiently as possible. Out of campaign times, we only use about six to eight per cent of the capacity of our servers, but during our fundraising events, the infrastructure simply has to be flexible enough to change focus very quickly, and Grid enables that."
The technology was load tested during the charity's Sport Relief event on 15 July, 2006 and enabled it to take 15 percent more donations than had previously been the case. The organisation also saw the number of partner staff required to help with system monitoring reduced from 17 to 10 as resource allocation became less of a manual process.
"We previously had to have a substantial collection of partner people there to help us with decisions on resource utilisation, but we were able to slim that down this time. Most of them work on a voluntary basis so it means asking favours of less people and making better use of their skill sets so they don't have to tinker with the technology to find the answer to a question," Gill explains.
But the next step, according to Gill, is to optimise resource utilisation rates still further. To date, Comic Relief has been looking at controlled utilisation rates of 50 to 55 percent, but wants to grow the figure to 75 to 80 percent, although no higher than that.
"Otherwise, if the public responds in a way that we don't expect, there's not a huge amount of room for the Grid to move things around to accommodate it, whereas 80 percent is enough headspace to cope with specific changes,” explains Gill.
Despite the benefits of the technology, however, he does not advise organisations to rush into adopting virtualisation technology or Grid.
"We took a gently, gently approach over 18 months and that worked well for us. So I'd advise people that, when they come to their normal refresh cycle, to do it with a view to creating an infrastructure that could support Grid. Most people are in the process of trying to maintain their infrastructure and do other things at the same time and it does require fairly substantial change," Gill says.
As a result, he recommends upgrading hardware, introducing clustering technology or implementing virtualisation middleware in stages rather than adopting a big-bang approach.
"Part of our challenge as a charity is to be as efficient as we can, especially in relation to technology utilisation. We need to know that our infrastructure is working as well as it can and that we can squeeze the pips, but we also need to know that it can respond to change in as flexible a way as possible," adds Gill.
