3par to Support Red Nose Day Transaction Storm

3PAR has provided the backend storage infrastructure to collect charitable donations taken in by Comic Relief on Red Nose Day 2009, taking place on March 13th. The storage infrastructure is built on 3PAR InServ T-Class Storage Servers, the world’s most powerful virtualized storage arrays, and is designed to handle up to 1.4 million transactions on the day of the event, generated through the Red Nose Day website and a 12,000-seat call centre.

 
Red Nose Day is a nation-wide fundraising event organised by Comic Relief every two years to encourage people to cast inhibitions aside, put on a red nose, and ‘Do Something Funny for Money,’ the theme of this year’s event. Funds raised make a difference in the lives of thousands of people across Africa and the UK who are facing terrible injustice or living in abject poverty.
 
The substantial technology donation from 3PAR was coordinated through its customer Carrenza, the IT hosting partner delivering the highly virtualized backend for Red Nose Day’s donation engine. To supplement the InServ T-Class Storage Server already deployed at Carrenza, 3PAR has donated an additional 3PAR InServ T-Class Storage Server to support Red Nose Day donation transactions. In addition to contributions made online, for the evening of the event Comic Relief has lined up 12,000 volunteers to collect gifts pledged by phone. To support this enormous volume of activity, the collection engine backend provided by Carrenza is built on 3cV, which combines highly virtualized Utility Storage from 3PAR with HP BladeSystem c-Class server blades and server virtualization software from VMware.
 
“Since its inception in 1988, Red Nose Day has raised over half a billion pounds and helped change millions of lives,” said Colin Simon, Business Director of Comic Relief. “The coming event is the culmination of two years of planning and six weeks of build-up to the actual night, when we expect to exceed the record set in 2007, at which point we raised over £60m in one night. We are grateful to our technical partners like 3PAR and Carrenza who provide the infrastructure to make this amazing feat possible.”
 
“We could not be more excited to be helping make Red Nose Day 2009 a success” said David Scott, President and CEO for 3PAR. “Comic Relief isn’t about emergency aid, but long-term sustainable change. This is very much in line with 3PAR’s company values, not only as a leader in sustainable, Green Storage, but also in our legacy of technical innovation in the areas of performance, efficiency, and cost reduction.”