Online betting firm Betfair is working on a global utility computing model for processing web site traffic.

The three-year project, which will see the implementation of virtual clusters worldwide, aims to cater for peaks in demand and avoid delays for sporting events that require high computing power, such as the Grand National.

The firm operates eight main datacentres around the world, plus five “mini” datacentres.

“With the transition to a grid computing standard, we will be able to divert our computing power to areas that need it, which will be very useful as we are geographically dispersed,” said Betfair’s IS director, Tony Rigby.

“Our ultimate aim is to have virtualised datacentres dotted across the world, so we can re-route resources to different countries based on demand in different times of the day,” he said.

Currently, Betfair’s system requirements are measured by a performance capacity team that monitors the functioning of the company’s applications round the clock via 30,000 points from a global network operation centre.

The performance is tested against thresholds that enable the company to generate customer projections, map demand and define capacity of systems supporting different products, which have their own individual infrastructure sitting on Betfair’s core platform.

Sun Microsystems supports Betfair’s main server fleet, which comprises around 1,200 machines. The same equipment has been in use for a number of years as part of an effort to rationalise costs.

“Our key objective is not to be forced to do hardware changes because of performance,” said Rigby.

“As the company expands, I don’t want to have 20 or 30 times the amount of hardware that I currently have, because it is a management and financial burden,” he said. “One of the prime objectives of the IT department is to make continuous efforts to improve our core platform to sweat assets as much as we can.”

The online gambling firm began using virtualisation for some of its smaller products six months ago, but the technology will play a crucial role in the company’s future plans.

“Virtualisation is the future of IT and we have massive projects centred on that,” said Rigby.

A datacentre in Guernsey is where the majority of Betfair’s initiatives in this area will be rolled out and the company plans to bring the facility “as close as possible to a fully virtualised environment”.

The Guernsey facility will eventually be home to all the firm’s development, quality assurance (QA) and disaster recovery environments. The company expects to set up around 1,200 virtual systems in the datacentre over the next 12 months. It aims to reach a virtualisation ratio of between eight and 48 virtual systems for each physical server. Hardware is then reused in areas such as QA.

“The idea is to bring in new servers to run virtualisation and reallocate physical servers to other parts of the business. We buy good technology that allows us to do that, but at the same time we are really frugal with our pennies,” said Rigby.