Extract taken from TMC Net
The popular Big Brother reality television show is now being supported by managed services provider Claranet. The company will provide scalable, high availability hosting and management services for the show, which airs on Channel 5 in the UK.
By using a hybrid cloud environment, the service from Claranet enables Big Brother's dedicated website to handle surges in demand. The scalability of the services ensures that Channel 5 only pays for the capacity they need and use at any given time.
The addition of the online program has doubled Channel 5's total web traffic, and yet applications have experienced 100 percent uptime, the company reports. The channel's digital offerings center around two dedicated Big Brother services. These include a standalone Big Brother site offering VoD, live updates and editorial content and a Big Brother 2011 Facebook app. Both services are hosted and managed by Claranet.
Big Brother was brought to Channel 5 through a deal signed with production company Endemol in April. This left just five months before the first episode was scheduled to be broadcast. Application hosting and management was successfully implemented and tested by Claranet in only six weeks.
Claranet's managed application hosting is based at the company's own facilities. It is complemented by using Amazon Web Services' Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform, which enables dynamic provisioning so that Channel 5 only has to pay for the burst capacity it uses.
Martin Saunders, Product Marketing Director at Claranet said:
The service is designed to handle 45,000 page impressions per second, so it can deal with the sudden surges of interest that is part and parcel of Big Brother. Factoring in the very unpredictability of the program, the application hosting design gives Channel 5 the ability to scale the service to their needs in real time, and burst into the cloud at times of peak demand, while the resilience of the service is evident in the 100 percent uptime that has been achieved.