01 Aug 2007: IAAF chooses NTT Europe Online
The International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) has selected NTT Europe Online to host and secure its website during the Osaka World Championships – ensuring a reliable web presence for the sport’s governing body.
With 212 affiliated federations making up its membership and millions of athletics fans around the world relying on up-to-the-minute information from its website, the IAAF requires a web presence robust enough to cope with the huge influx of traffic an event like the World Championships will generate.
During the event, dedicated teams will produce video clips, live results and other features while IAAF journalists will publish news and pictures directly to the IAAF website (www.iaaf.org), creating a vast information resource for athletics fan across the globe. Athletes will compete in more than twenty-five different disciplines at Osaka, with many of the events taking place simultaneously – driving traffic to the site as fans check on their athletes’ progress. To cope with these traffic spikes, the IAAF taps into NTT Europe Online’s Smart Content Delivery service (SCD), which uses a number of strategically located cache servers throughout Europe, the USA and Asia/Pacific to balance the load – meaning no single server has to handle all of the user demand.
“We are an international organisation, with more members than the UN and millions of fans worldwide. They rely on us to deliver a quality service. This is a great responsibility and we have therefore taken every possible measure to ensure the integrity of the website during the event,” said Emanuele Perotti Nigra, Head of Information Technology at the IAAF. “The World Championships generates enormous interest so we needed a hosting partner that we knew could deliver for us. NTT Europe Online has a global reputation and an unsurpassed track record in sports for successful hosting implementations – making it the obvious choice.”
Christopher Quinton, Country Manager for France at NTT Europe Online adds: “Our engineers and technical teams have worked with the IAAF to create a tailor-made solution to fit its exact requirements. We have extensive experience providing secure and robust infrastructure and hosting solutions to cope with the phenomenal demand on internet bandwidth generated by global events such as the World Championships. We take great pride in being able to offer our customers industry leading availability and security assurances.”
Complementing the Smart Content Delivery service during the event is a business continuity site using a virtualisation platform. Based in London, away from the main location in Paris, this site backs up the already formidable dependability of the multi-server SCD.
NTT Europe Online’s experience in developing and managing web hosting solutions for large sporting organisations is vast, with sites such as FIFA and UEFA part of its portfolio.
