Betfair balances spikes in traffic and eliminates downtime

Challenge – Manage traffic growth and uneven demand

“Our biggest challenge is dealing with very spikey demand for services,” says Ramesh Subbarayalu , Acting Information Systems Director, Betfair. “Compared with most web-based businesses, we can have sudden huge increases in activity when a sporting game abruptly changes direction and the favourite looks like losing. Being able to respond to these situations is vital. Unlike normal e-commerce sites, where delays or downtime simply mean the customer has to wait or come back, our situation is acute. The transaction can only happen at that particular moment. People need to know they can trade out of a position, so uptime is absolutely critical for us.”

Betfair also needed to maximise its datacentre space and reduce the ongoing cost of servers. Over time, as the traffic to Betfair’s website continued to grow, so did the number of servers the company had to manage and house. The cost and space required to power, cool and house them was considerable and Betfair was looking for a virtualization solution.

The solution –Citrix NetScaler meets both current and future needs

When it came to addressing the load balancing needs, the company chose to upgrade from their original Citrix®NetScaler® implementation to Citrix®NetScaler®5.0, Platinum Edition, capable of addressing both current and future needs.

For the virtualization platform, Betfair considered several solutions but decided that Citrix®XenServer®5.0 performed better and offered a more cost competitive option. It has allowed Betfair’s servers to be consolidated, leading to real savings in power, cooling and space.

Business benefits – Optimised connections save bandwidth cost and reduce server numbers

With Web 2.0 capability, NetScaler made it possible to handle thousands of connections simultaneously. During major events, such as the World Cup or an Australian football final, the action shifts minute by minute. The web servers need to scale up instantly to maintain connections and push information as the game changes and punters react. NetScaler sits between the web servers and the users to optimise the connections for speed and efficiency, allowing Betfair to use fewer servers than would otherwise be possible.

“The most striking benefit of NetScaler is that it has kept our web site up and online consistently, handling even the greatest of loads,” said Subbarayalu. “We have as many as 1.9 million transactions a day go through our web site.”

NetScaler hasn’t just ensured that the main web site portal is available and secure, it has also reduced the response time to dynamic events and minimised broadband costs. Betfair uses Netscaler for SSL offload, which greatly reduces the CPU load on the web servers and gives them more capacity. NetScaler sends compressed packets if the browser being used by a customer can handle HTTP compression. “We get data compression of around 50 percent which has created a significant saving on our bandwidth charge of $75,000 a month,” says Subbarayalu.

Surge queuing has been another major benefit of NetScaler5.0. When there is a lot of demand on the site, NetScaler manages the queue of requests and keeps the browser connection open for each user until his or her request can be dealt with.

Betfair runs many applications to ensure their business can meet the demands of their users. NetScaler affords these applications the same level of security and application acceleration, without having to invest development effort for these functions with each application.

“We have been running NetScaler here for four years now and it has been fantastic, rock solid,” says Subbarayalu.

Future plans – Move to Web 2.0

Betfair is looking to move its environment to Web 2.0, changing the conventional push-pull dynamic of betting sites.  Now, users go to the site, pull down information on bets, check the odds and then place their bets. With Web 2.0, most users will simply keep the web page open, tracking events with information being pushed to them. Betfair has already redesigned several applications to do just that. It will require changes to its current architecture and NetScaler will take over that workload from the web servers.

Another important change is the significant increase in the use of mobile devices. Again, NetScaler has played a key role by being able to redirect traffic according to the type of device the request has come from. Clearly, the use of various mobile devices to access highly dynamic sites, such as betting, is a trend that will continue to grow.

The next step for Betfair will be to refresh the web server tier as data is being virtualized on XenServer. The plan is to implement a truly dynamic datacentre with Web 2.0 web application development. Betfair is also exploring the option of using NetScaler VPX virtual appliances for its testing and development environment, eliminating the need for a physical server for testing.