VMware Case Studies - Powered by Bulletproof
Movember.com and IE: Seamless scalability powers mens' health charity to a record result.
The Driver: Seamlessly scalable, high-performance, highly available hosting.
When Movember.com and development partner IE were evaluating hosting suppliers in May 2007, historical exponential growth of the moustache growing charity event required that the managed hosting provider selected be able to deliver not only high performance and availability but also the ability for the hosting to be seamlessly ramped up during campaign and peak load periods and then scaled back during off-peak periods was also essential.
Why Bulletproof: Fully Managed Enterprise Dedicated VM Hosting
In June of the same year, Bulletproof Networks' award-winning Enterprise Dedicated VM Hosting was selected to power the Movember.com 2007 campaign.
Having delivered managed hosting and infrastructure management services to larger enterprises including BlueScope Steel and SAI Global, Bulletproof was perfectly placed to roll out the required managed hosting on time and on budget for a smooth campaign launch.
In addition to a comprehensive suite of NFS, application and database servers and over and above the Dedicated VM Hosting platform's 3.0 and Sun Microsystems server and SAN infrastructure, Movember and IE benefited from the product's other managed inclusions of managed firewalls and loadbalancers.
Starting from a base of a handful of application and database servers, IE worked with Bulletproof to scale up to 5 times as many servers during the month to deliver the infrastructure backbone of the most successful Movember to date.
Following the peak registration, interaction/upload and donation periods at the end of November and the start of December, the infrastructure was then smoothly scaled back throughout December to lay active but largely dormant until Movember 2008's campaign was launched in September 2008.
Internationally Scalable Architecture Design: Internationally located reverse proxies signal the start of globally optimised application hosting infrastructure.
For Movember.com 2008, IE and Bulletproof was engaged to design and roll out additional infrastructure to handle a forecast 5-fold increase in traffic as well as greatly increased international traffic from the UK and US.
To deliver both increased local performance and international scalability, Bulletproof has deployed both global DNS services and load balanced international reverse proxies.
Coupled with increased local hybrid VMware 3.5 and Sun Microsystems virtualised and physical farm infrastructure, Bulletproof once more worked closely with IE to ensure that the entire infrastructure has been optimised to the application to deliver the robust and scalable hosting required to handle the forecast growth.