When punters place their bets with online wagering company, Sportsbet for today's Melbourne Cup, storage arrays in Melbourne and Darwin will help manage traffic spikes.
The arrays, provided by Dell’s storage division, Compellent, help the company manage website transaction loads that are six times greater than workloads it would experience on a typical Tuesday.
Sportsbet senior systems administrator, Scott Rosicka told Computerworld Australia that the storage systems will get a healthy workout today with expected traffic spikes from this morning through to when the Melbourne Cup race finishes this afternoon.
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“Using the storage arrays mean we can make sure that the data that the business really needs on those days is up and going to give us the performance that we need when the load is at its peak,” he said.
“The Sportsbet business is 100 per cent online so without those systems our business would not be operating at all.”
According to Rosicka, today’s race meet is the biggest day on its calendar for site traffic closely followed by the Caulfield Cup horse race, which is run two weeks before the Melbourne Cup.
“We design our systems to meet expected production loads plus 20 per cent so we are not hitting maximum loads of the system,” he said.
“The IT department also does preventative maintenance where support engineers remotely log into the system and do health checks to make sure that everything is running at optimal performance before any of the major race days.”
Once the race day is over and the Sportsbet website traffic goes back to normal, the company begins using the anonymous punter data to begin preparing for Cup day in 2013.
“The wider business does use the [website] data and we don’t cleanse that out. The data we get to analyse is used to start planning for the year ahead,” Rosicka said.
Sportsbet has been using the Compellent storage system for four years. Dell also provides the company’s desktops.
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