Loop, Frontline manage SBS' World Cup website load

Resellers Loop Technology and Frontline have rolled out infrastructure that manages the millions of weekly visitors to SBS' website during the World Cup football tournament.

SBS recently purchased two BIG-IP 3400 traffic management systems and Layer 4-7 switches for load balancing from F5 Networks, which were being managed by security integrator Loop Technology.

Integrator Frontline, is hosting SBS’s back up web site at its Sydney-based data centre, said Greg Koen, manager, information systems group at SBS.

“SBS’s Artarmon office runs the World Game site on a Sun server hardware with one of two F5 BIG-IPs. The second sits at Frontline's Ultimo data centre which essentially mirrors the SBS environment with an identical Sun hardware platform,” he said.

In the event of extreme web traffic spikes during the 2006 World Cup, Frontline’s environment will provide SBS with extra hosting and serving capacity adding guaranteed uptime, multiple redundancy in power and cooling and seamless continuity of service.

“Our normal World Game site traffic is around six million page views per month. During Australia’s qualifying stage with Uruguay in late 2005, that figure went up to six million page views in one week,” said Koen.

“The day after the Socceroos beat Japan we had 1 million page per views on the World Games site, and since then we've had 600,000 page per views per day.”

Steve Murphy, managing director at Frontline, said this was an exciting project, however it will be flat out getting SBS’ next project up and running.

“Once this is over, we have to keep on our toes for the Tour de France which is pretty big global event. We are also in talks with SBS about assisting its website for the Ashes at the end of the year,” he said.

SBS had dealt with both companies in the past. “SBS has enjoyed a long relationship with both Frontline and Loop, so they were a natural choice for helping us with our World Cup demands,” Koen said.

SBS's World Cup website is at http://www.theworldgame.com.au.