Marie Keating Foundation on cloud nine with partner DNA IT
DNA IT and IBM Cloud Case Study Marie Keating Foundation
The Marie Keating Foundation is one of the leading voices in Ireland for cancer prevention, awareness, and support.
As its traditional fundraising was shut down by Covid-19, in 2020 the Marie Keating Foundation introduced a televised event to help raise funds to continue to provide their support services. This was the first ever Concert4Cancer and although it was well-received, the first twohour telethon event was impacted by technical issues on the night the concert was live on TV.
The volume of traffic hitting the donation page on the website was too much for the underlying infrastructure to cope with and so there was prolonged downtime for several minutes at a time. This had the knock-on effect of reducing the amount of much-needed donations the foundation received.
When planning the 2021 Concert4Cancer, the issue of how well the website’s infrastructure could cope with a high spike in visitors over a couple of hours had to be addressed. Due to the Covid crisis and resource constraints, the website provider realised their hosted web servers would not be adequate to run the website for the televised event and the risk of the site crashing was too high, with a bigger TV audience anticipated this year, over the original one in 2020.
NO TIME FOR TRADITIONAL IT APPROACH
DNA IT got a call from the Marie Keating Foundation to see if we could help and provide a highperformance website infrastructure for the event – the problem was there was only seven days until the event. Using the traditional IT infrastructure model, we would have had to design the architecture to run in the Marie Keating Foundation’s existing IT environment. This would have taken at least seven to eight weeks, assuming no delays in the supply chain and no networking problems.
Obviously – given the timeframe we had to work with this option was not going to work, so we turned to our IBM cloud environment instead.
One of the main challenges was trying to assess what level of hits the site needed to be able to withstand, so we opted for a cautious approach, better safe than sorry with a live TV event – and the system that we built could take two million hits over the two hours of the live TV broadcast. If the server did encounter a technical problem and failed, the workload would seamlessly fall over to the redundant servers in the cluster to carry on.
OUTCOME
Within five days the technical team in DNA IT had designed, built and thoroughly tested a high-performance website infrastructure that would be able to handle a TV fundraising event of any scale up to a million hits per hour.
The Concert4Cancer ran successfully on Virgin Media One on September 27. The website infrastructure worked perfectly and there were no performance issues whatsoever.
The high-performance cloud infrastructure can be recreated again for the 2022 Concert4Cancer and now that we know how well it worked for this year’s event, we have a head start in terms of planning for the 2022 event.
Liz Yeates, CEO of the Marie Keating Foundation, said: “We are truly grateful to our longstanding IT partners DNA IT Solutions who came to our rescue at our hour of need this August. Given the challenges we faced with Covid-19, with all our traditional fundraising events curtailed, we became very reliant on the Concert4Cancer as a way of raising funds to keep our cancer awareness and support services going.
“By providing the high-performance cloud infrastructure we could rest assured that donors coming to our website to donate would not have technical issues despite the heavily increased volume of traffic within the two-hour period.”