Film and television charity BAFTA is set to move to the cloud as a way of handling its peak traffic. IaaS provider Rackspace is to power a number of BAFTA websites to enable the film and television organisation to respond more effectively to what they call the "significant" peaks in traffic received by its websites on Awards nights.
BAFTA now runs most of its online services via the Rackspace public cloud. The servers provided by the IaaS company provide 8GB of RAM and, it is claimed, higher performance than what was previously used.
According to the organisations it is anticipated that when BAFTA's central website, which is currently under redevelopment, relaunches in summer 2014, this will result in significant cost savings compared to the 24GB physical servicers it was running on previously.
Additionally, Rackspace is providing BAFTA with a dedicated cloud specialist, who will help with the deployments of its websites and ensure the on-boarding process is as smooth as possible.
Kevin Price, BAFTA COO, said: "After switching to Rackspace, busy periods such as during the 2014 [BAFTA] Film Awards and Games Awards were a great success.
Our dedicated Rackspace team manually monitored web traffic so capacity was scaled up and then back down again in real time. Where previously our site has occasionally underperformed during peaks in traffic, we're pleased to say that we received 100 percent uptime during our busiest season of the year and the excellent support we receive from the Rackspace team was a huge reassurance on awards night."
Jeff Cotten, managing director international at Rackspace added: "Working with a British institution like BAFTA has been a great experience and a real pleasure. As an independent charity BAFTA has some very specific cost saving goals to meet so it was great to be able to work so closely with them to help provide specialist approach and tailored product set they needed so they can focus on what they do best, promoting the arts in the UK."
