Bank of Canada
The Bank of Canada is Canada’s central bank. It is an instrument of the federal government to implement monetary policy and promote a sound financial system. The Bank faced a difficult situation. Although their website runs on a high-end infrastructure that handles regular traffic without difficulty, a number of times a year – for instance, when interest rate changes are announced or Canada Savings Bonds campaigns are launched – it experienced massive spikes in traffic which overloaded server resources and made their website unavailable.
Rather than invest large amounts in additional hardware and software, the Bank of Canada engaged Carbon60 to solve the problem. Carbon60 recommended that the Bank implement a content-distribution network and worked with the Bank of Canada to get its web content integrated with Akamai’s CDN service. Carbon60 determined the optimal caching strategies for various content types and took care of the actual configuration and administration of the Akamai account. Carbon60 also worked with the Bank to do comprehensive performance testing of the site’s new configuration prior to the Bank’s next announcement.
According to the Bank, “The outcome has been extremely positive. During our most recent interest-rate announcement the Bank’s servers scarcely registered the huge surge in traffic and we see better-than-usual response times for overseas users. By working with Carbon60 the cost to the Bank has been much lower than adding more hardware would have been.”
Comda
Comda Advertising Connections is one of the world’s largest suppliers of calendars printed with corporate advertising. Its success depends on the tight integration of the sales, manufacturing, and shipping to process quickly thousands of orders daily. Comda has 250 employees and multiple physical locations in the Toronto area including its sales office and printing plant. The availability and security of Comda’s custom ERP system, which integrates all aspects of its operations, is crucial to daily operations.
Over time Comda’s IT demands outgrew its in-house facilities and the capabilities of its in-house IT staff. Without significant upgrades to emergency power and cooling systems its on-premise data room could no longer support Comda’s business needs. Significant capital investment was also required to build a SAN infrastructure capable of supporting its growing storage requirements. To manage this increased complexity and deliver a higher quality of services, Comda was also looking at growing its internal IT team.
For a number of years, Carbon60 was providing disaster recovery services to Comda by replicating their on-site production ERP database to its Toronto data center. After consulting with Comda on its future business requirements, Carbon60 proposed an Enterprise Cloud solution as an alternative to the significant short and long term capital investments and ballooning operating costs associated with an in-house solution.
Carbon60′s Enterprise Cloud solution has three key components: 1) an enterprise-class network, storage and cloud computing infrastructure; 2) a WAN management and acceleration service; 3) an integrated Disaster Recovery solution; and 4) a comprehensive End-to-End Technical Support model. Together, these components formed a comprehensive IT-as-a-Service solution with significant business benefits to Comda, including:
Reduced Business Risk:
- IT infrastructure centralized in top-tier datacenter with robust security and environmental controls
- Application hosted on fully redundant cloud computing architecture
- Geo-diverse disaster recovery implemented for business-critical applications
- Increased visibility and control via suite of enterprise monitoring, backup, and administration tools
- 24×7 Service Desk trained to monitor infrastructure and respond to incidents
- Access to pool of expert system administrators and engineers
- Accountability of IT services enforced through industry-leading SLA guarantees
Improved Business Agility:
- IT resources scaled up and down seamlessly to meet peak periods of demand
- New systems launched in minutes to support new projects
- Per day and per month billing models used for temporary system usage
- Greater flexibility via Carbon60′s comprehensive service portfolio
Reduced Capital Costs:
- Eliminated expense of upgrading on-premise datacenter
- Eliminated expense of implementing an enterprise SAN architecture
- Eliminated existing and future need to replace end-of-life servers
- Eliminated cost of new backup and monitoring infrastructure
Reduced Operational Costs:
- Eliminated need to hire additional in-house IT resources
- Eliminated expensive consulting services
The end result for Comda of adopting Carbon60′s Enterprise Cloud solution is a dramatic improvement in the value delivered by IT services. Not only have existing and future capital costs been eliminated but operational costs have been reduced going forward compared to a less capable in-house solution Comda was considering. “It has been such a huge relief for Carbon60 to assume accountability for our core business infrastructure,” notes the Director of IT at Comda, Melody Collet. “Their Enterprise Cloud Solution was exactly what we needed going forward in terms of reducing costs while covering off the capabilities we needed to improve our agility and eliminate the significant business risks we faced with our existing IT infrastructure. We have worked with Carbon60 on a more limited basis in the past and service was great. After we completed a business and technical review of their Enterprise Cloud proposal, it became obvious that outsourcing to Carbon60 was the next best step for us.”
Tennis Canada
Tennis Canada is Canada’s national governing body of tennis. Formed in 1890, it is a not-for-profit organization and a full member of the International Tennis Federation and is charged with the development of tennis in Canada. It oversees the Canada Davis Cup Team and Canada Fed Cup Team and is host to Rogers Cup, a WTA Tier 1 tournament that features many of the world’s best tennis players in the world. Tennis Canada has three web properties that it uses to communicate with its members and the general public: tenniscanada.com, lovemeansnothing.ca, and the very high profile rogerscup.com.
As a long time vendor, Carbon60 has seen many changes at Tennis Canada including four different web development firms. Through this time, Carbon60 has taken full responsibility for the delivery of its web properties. It has worked very closely with Tennis Canada and each web development firm to ensure the greatest possible quality of service. This is particularly true regarding everything involving the Rogers Cup tournament which is a 2 week blizzard of activity each summer and a critical source of revenue for Tennis Canada.
The close working relationship between Tennis Canada and Carbon60 is exemplified by the work done immediately before the launch of lovemeansnothing.ca during the Rogers Cup in 2010. To promote the launch of the site, Tennis Canada arranged for Raphael Nadal to be flown in by helicopter for an exclusive web cast. However, because of development delays, Carbon60 received the code for the new site less than a week before launch. Then, after routine performance testing, Carbon60 determined that the site would not meet minimum throughput targets do to poor design and coding. It was a crisis for Tennis Canada and, after firing the developers, their President asked Carbon60 if it could fix the problems. Although not a web development firm, Carbon60 worked overtime to salvage the situation using in-house development resources and our extensive experience with high performance WordPress websites. At other times, Carbon60 has sent staff offsite to work alongside developers to overcome development issues. Although rarely this dramatic, it is Carbon60′s willingness to partner with our customers to resolve development issues that sets it apart from most other web hosting companies.
Another key business requirement of Tennis Canada is a web hosting solution that can scale affordability to meet the huge bursts of traffic associated with a high profile sporting event like the Rogers Cup. Building an infrastructure capable of handling the Rogers Cup at tournament time, Sportsnet.ca at the NHL trade deadline, or royalwedding.citytv.com the day of the wedding is inefficient and cost prohibitive if it will remain relatively idle the remainder of the year or not be used again. Fortunately, Carbon60′s WordPress-as-a-Service and other enterprise-ready cloud hosting platforms are engineered specifically to scale throughput dynamically to maintain latency targets during large spikes in web traffic. Thus, while Tennis Canada’s costs increase temporarily during the Roger’s Cup, their costs are far lower the rest of the year.
