21 million competition entries made possible through IPsoft infrastructure management

London, 12 July 2012 - As part of its 15th Anniversary, global airline network Star Alliance hosted a global contest on a specially designed web portal. The infrastructure was provided by IPsoft, a leading provider of managed services, and Wusys, who supply cloud computing services.

For the 15th Anniversary of Star Alliance in mid-May, 178 million frequent fliers were invited to enter the web-based contest, with first place winning  a voyage to various cultural events within the airline network with up to fourteen friends.

To ensure a smooth processing of the global internet contest, a separate web page with an introduction video and a Java-based web application was created.

As Star Alliance expected up to 21,000 participants entering the web page at any one point, the infrastructure for the data traffic had to be enlarged up to 150 TB. Therefore Star Alliance decided to use a highly available, scalable and flexible cloud solution that was provided by IPsoft. Subsequently, 21 million users were able to participate in the contest without any downtime over the entire five week period.

Rudolf Kergassner, Managing Director of IPsoft Germany, explained: “One of the key challenges of the project was the short project duration. Starting from the conception stage through extensive testing to the point of initial operation, we had a time frame of six weeks. Furthermore, we had to ensure that the created infrastructure was configured to cope with large peaks in traffic.”

The new web page was hosted in a cloud environment made available by Wusys, based in Frankfurt, provider of branch-independent IT services and a partner of IPsoft.  The management, monitoring and the integrated operation of the Cloud-solution has been carried out by IPsoft, a company which has been successfully co- working with Star Alliance since 2011.  Through IPsoft’s worldwide presence, all services can be provided and guaranteed under the “Follow the sun” principle, i.e. 24 hours a day seven days a week.

John Donohoe, Director of Project Management Office, Star Alliance, explained: “From a technological point of view, the requirements in this project were extensive. With IPsoft, we found a partner who provided us with a cloud and network environment under extreme time-intensive conditions and helped us to manage the deluge of users to the site that was envisaged. We were incredibly impressed that IPsoft managed to complete the project both in time and budget.”