NTT Europe Online provides infrastructure for euro2008.com

Virtualization and managed hosting technology support record web traffic levels on euro2008.com

London, 03 July 2008: NTT Europe Online, managed hosting provider to UEFA official public websites and extranet platform reveals how virtualization technology was used as part of its hosting platform to support record levels of web traffic to www.euro2008.com, the official website for the 2008 European Championships.

NTT Europe Online provides UEFA with dedicated architecture and design, implementation service delivery and live event teams to ensure the smooth running of the tournament online. The core managed hosting services consisted of over 50 terabytes of storage, Content Delivery Network solutions, hosting, virtualized servers and network-level security that ran over NTT Europe Online’s global IP network.  There were also many virtualized production and back-end environments to service the IT applications, portals and extranets required for a global event web site such as euro2008.com.

Andy Pattison, Project Manager for www.euro2008.com said of the site: “With 1.2 billion page views, 100 million visits by over 50 million visitors from over 200 countries logging on within one month, it was paramount that we delivered concise and quality coverage of the tournament online. We chose NTT Europe Online as partners for their expertise in hosting large and complex online events.”

“euro2008.com offers live streaming of all 31 finals matches, footage of 130 games from previous tournaments as well as an archive of a few thousand matches from UEFA competitions. Increased demand for online video was a challenge that only a partner with technology and an international infrastructure could solve.”

Niels Hilbrink Account Director at NTT Europe Online added:  “It was expected there would be online demand like no other previous tournament and that video would play a huge part in this. With live events, you only get one shot at getting it right.  www.euro2008.com is a testament to UEFA’s forward-looking perspective on technology and how it can be used to reach more and more football fans across the globe.”

“Virtualization was only one of a range of technologies used on this occasion, but it was a perfect demonstration of how it can help deliver extra computing resources when needed. The performance of the network as a whole was vital too, especially given the peak traffic loads of 9.1 Gigabits per second and a predicted 300 terabytes of traffic throughout the tournament.”