Betfair

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The Internet’s true pioneers see opportunities to launch entirely new forms of business on the Web. One such company is Betfair, the innovative U.K. firm behind the world’s leading online betting exchange.

This new kind of Web site allows customers to choose their own odds and bet against one another on sports and other contests, even after an event has started. The concept has proven to be tremendously popular in the U.K. and many other countries: Betfair doubled its business for the fourth straight year in 2005 while processing more than 1.2 billion bets. Customers deposit approximately £ 1,000 (U.S. $1,840) on the site every minute.

Betfair’s success, however, is based on more than just a good idea. In order to keep growing, the online service relies on scalable Web server and storage technology from Sun Microsystems.

Sun has been Betfair’s primary Web platform vendor from the first bet. Sun Fire servers and Sun disk arrays have become mainstays for serving Web pages and processing transactions in Betfair’s two data centers in the U.K. In 2006, when it needed to establish a third data center to support its entry into the Australian market in the state of Tasmania, Betfair looked again to Sun as its technology partner for global expansion.

Local regulations required Betfair to place its Web servers within Tasmania in order to make its services available in Australia. Betfair worked with Web architecture experts from Sun Client Solutions and Sun Enterprise Consolidation Solutions to replicate and enhance its existing U.K. infrastructure within four months. The configuration and data migration took place in the U.K. Betfair then shipped the finished system components to Tasmania.

The platform solution includes multiple racks of Sun Fire X4100 Web servers and Sun Fire T2000 gateway servers running the Solaris 10 Operating System. Betfair tested the new T2000 servers in its internal lab and selected them based on exceptional cost-performance, unequaled energy savings and space-saving compute density.

Solaris 10 features such as Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) help Betfair optimize performance. The data center environment also includes high-performance Sun Fire E6900 database servers used to process transactions and Sun StorageTek 9985 disk systems offering fast throughput and efficient, virtualized storage management.

Sun's scalable and flexible server technology helped Betfair design the new data center to support both immediate needs and long-term expansion. Betfair can quickly add capacity in a cost-effective way by adding new UltraSPARC IV+ processors to the Sun Fire E6900 servers, or by plugging new Sun Fire X4100 servers into the existing architecture. The Sun Fire X4100 servers deliver an added benefit of energy efficiency through lower power and cooling costs. The binary compatibility of Solaris OS with existing Web applications has allowed Betfair to quickly migrate software to the new servers.

Betfair now expects to achieve the same fast throughput, instantaneous response times and round-the-clock availability in Tasmania that have become the hallmarks of its main U.K. Web site. The online exchange processes 99.9% of all bets within one second and 99.5% in less than a quarter second.

Using the knowledge gained from the move into Australia, Betfair can now use Sun technology to repeat the process to support future expansion. At Betfair, the odds look good for more remarkable growth.