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99% for the portfolio platform (poker and gaming products).” Betfair is also committed to bet matching in under a second and page loads within three seconds – a serious challenge given the fact that there are more than seven billion page views of betfair.com every week. Indeed, the company processes more than seven million transactions every day, and also has to respond to huge surges in demand around large sporting events, such as the Grand National or the FIFA World Cup. “To meet these customer pledges, Betfair requires a network that is always available; that can be upgraded hot; can cope with the demands placed on it; and, if it fails, will failover without affecting customers,” says Turner. Betfair’s customer service commitment includes just four hours downtime each month. Never afraid to innovate and embrace the way towards the future, Betfair is excited to explore the shift towards virtualisation and cloud technologies, a move that will change the data centre architecture from a predominantly north/south model towards more east/west traffic. With this in mind, in 2010, Betfair made the decision to move to 10GE on its server platform and, as a result, needed to refresh its switching infrastructure to ensure the network could scale and grow to accommodate cloud based service delivery for the next three to ?ve years. “There were very few products on the market that could deliver the high-density compute model Betfair wanted,” says Turner. Betfair opted for a modular switch chassis 7508 from Arista. “Arista offers a high-density compute model in a very well engineered platform. The low-latency switching was a bonus,” he explains. As Betfair begins to implement its shift towards virtualisation and cloud technologies, the company is keen to minimise proprietary technology. “Arista’s work with cloud and virtualisation technologies was also compelling for Betfair,” says Turner. “The cloud is fundamentally changing the way services are hosted. Effective cloud design will demand open, not proprietary, technologies and Arista’s commitment to driving open systems, from its open source platform to its work with standards wherever possible is very important to Betfair.” Betfair was immediately impressed by Arista’s business model and technology transparency. “Unlike other switch vendors, Arista is not only focused on a speci?c market area – data centre switching – but has a technology model that can be explained in
B E T FA I R A R I S TA
A cloud-based future
Betfair takes the next step in technological innovation by investing in Arista Network’s 10G switching technology. eGaming Review talks to Tim Turner, head of global infrastructure services at Betfair
Technology innovation has contributed signi?cantly to Betfair becoming the world??