UEFA, the Union des Associations Européennes de Football, is the governing body of football in Europe. Founded in 1954, UEFA now has over 50 member national football associations, and is responsible for organising European competitions for men and women players at club and national-team level, as well as for handling administrative matters related to football in Europe. Its headquarters are located in Nyon, on the shores of Lake Geneva in western Switzerland.
Web-hosting solution to support the Internet’s largest football portal
UEFA needed a solution that included design, launch and management of an Internet infrastructure that could support heavy use, reach a global audience and grow with the site as its global audience rapidly expands. UEFA’s need was immediate: the deadline loomed for the launch of the new uefa.com website and the UEFA Champions League live draw. The Web portal would have to provide live video and audio coverage of the event at uefa.com, and a robust infrastructure to support the unprecedented site traffic.
“Expertise in building, managing and supporting complex solutions made NTT Europe Online the best choice for us,” said Daniel Marion, Head of Technology, UEFA New Media. “I was looking for so much more than a global infrastructure provider. I needed a company that had the experience, the personnel and the expertise that would assure me that the project would be completed successfully in the relatively tight schedule we had."
Working in collaboration with uefa.com and our web designers, NTT Europe Online built just the infrastructure necessary to support heavy use and maximise site performance and manage the enormous task of migrating the infrastructure to the new solution.”
First Challenge
uefa.com passed its first major test in 2002 during the UEFA Champions League draw when it supported 350,000 page views and 65,000 visitors during the one hour period of the live draw. The site offered sustained bandwidth of 35Mbps during the 18 hour event period, and transferred a total of 90GB during the session, which included live video and audio coverage. 80% of the data transferred occurred during a 2-hour period immediately before, during and after the live draw.
New Record
“Having worked with NTT Europe Online during the last UEFA Champions League, which saw record traffic levels and a total traffic increase of more than 25 percent over previous years without any flaws occurring, we knew that the NTT Communications Smart Content Delivery (SCD) technology worked” said Daniel Marion, Head of Technology, UEFA New Media.
“With the kick-off of the new Champions League season we were receiving new record peaks – up to 300Mbps of throughput. We needed an infrastructure that could scale to meet the traffic peaks to ensure that fans around the world would get the information they needed, when they needed it, 24 hours a day. The NTT Europe Online solution helped us to meet these unprecedented demands.”
The next big challenge was UEFA EURO 2004™. Registrations on the site jumped massively to 1.5 million, over 500 million hits in 3 weeks and 44.5TB of traffic volume.
“euro2004.com was a content intensive web site hosted in eight different languages” explained Weynand Kuijpers VP Marketing and Sales Strategy at NTT Europe Online. “Fans could gain information on the tournament, teams, qualifiers, training and venues as well as regular updates on games. The site also offered multiplayer gaming, online shopping, auctions and ticket sales.”
Kuijpers added, “To accommodate all of these features, we’ve worked with UEFA New Media to create an infrastructure that is secure, scalable, highly available and reliable. UEFA EURO 2004™ was a great opportunity for us to showcase our capabilities as a Global Tier 1 Managed Services Provider and we’ve been excited to be involved with the tournament.”
The growing traffic
“We aim to develop our expertise to utilise the opportunities offered by new technologies, to provide a new online experience for fans and real benefits to our members,” underlines Gerhard Aigner, UEFA Chief Executive.
To reach the winning goal of global penetration and growth, NTT Europe Online geographically deployed an enterprise-hosting system that included an initial main hub site within Europe. Caching servers placed around the world on the NTT Communications Global IP Network feed cached data and streaming video to Internet users from a server located closest to them. By using a cache to store updated data, content no longer has to be provided by the origin server, offloading processing effort and speeding up content delivery.
“We know the robust site can support spikes in traffic that will come with major events, and we also credit NTT Europe Online with designing an infrastructure that is so scalable, comprehensive and stable,” said Daniel Marion.
The Future
uefa.com offers comprehensive coverage of all UEFA competitions, including the UEFA Champions League, UEFA Cup, UEFA European Football championships (EURO 2004), UEFA Youth and Women’s competitions. Coverage will include live audio streaming of matches, audio round-up shows, video clips, photo galleries, match reports and news of the competitions. To accommodate its ever-increasing fan base, UEFA plans to expand and enrich the offerings at uefa.com.
“NTT Europe Online allows room for increased bandwidth and scalability, and we intend to forge ahead with new technologies and features customers expect from uefa.com,” said Alexandre Fourtoy, UEFA New Media Chief Executive.