Carrenza announced as a technology partner for Sport Relief 2014

Carrenza is delighted to announce its continued support of Comic Relief as a key technology partner for this year’s Sport Relief. Since 2008 Carrenza has donated over 2.5 million pounds worth of infrastructure services and consultancy to Comic Relief to help ensure each Sport Relief and Red Nose Day campaign is a success.

Phil Latham, Head of Future Media and Technology at Comic Relief says: “Carrenza have helped us to develop an evolved and more flexible cloud strategy that allows us to make use of the best solution for each business and technical challenge, helping us to maximise the income we generate during each campaign. We are delighted that we are continuing to work with Carrenza for Sport Relief 2014 and we thank them for their continued support and generosity in ensuring that each campaign is a success.”

Dan Sutherland, CEO at Carrenza comments: “Our support of Comic Relief goes beyond a purely commercial relationship, as a team and as a company we believe in what they do, and we are hugely proud of the small part we play in helping them achieve their goals.

"This year we are also helping raise money by taking part in the Sainsbury's Sport Relief Cycle. Carrenza staff have formed a team to raise money by cycling 50 miles. Many of the team have never attempted anything like this before, for them it is a real challenge."

Core Comic Relief systems, including those handling donations, activity sign-ups and key back office functions will be hosted on Carrenza's Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) environment. Over the last six years Carrenza has offered reliability, scalability and flexibility of its IaaS meaning that, over the Sport Relief Weekend, Comic Relief can be confident that when they are needed, our Services will be available.

Within Carrenza services, reliability and scalability are driven by deep automation which allows the accurate replication critical for ensuring the ability to scale from a few to hundreds of servers in minutes, rapidly deploying both applications and the underlying compute resource.

This provides Comic Relief with the elasticity and reliability it needs to deliver on the unprecedented high levels of demand it’s likely to experience on the night. In previous years it had a peak of over 250 credit card transactions per second, five times as many transactions as Amazon Retail experienced on Cyber Monday (http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/dec/03/amazon-uk-cyber-monday-busiest-shopping-day).

This reflects Carrenza’s experience in retail, where Carrenza support clients such as Cineworld, Pottermore and Dutch retailer de Bijenkorf, who deliver some of Europe’s busiest and most demanding ecommerce environments.