Williams F1 uses AT&T Synaptic Hosting

Stephen Withers
Friday, 26 March 2010 15:32

Business IT - Technology

The AT&T Williams Formula 1 team is using AT&T's Synaptic Hosting service to help cope with massive peaks in web site traffic.

AT&T has been a major sponsor of the Williams Formula 1 team since early 2007, and part of the arrangement involves the delivery of communications and IT services.

One of the characteristics of major sport-related sites is that they experience extreme swings in traffic. The Williams site is no exception, with peaks occurring around each race on the F1 calendar.

To help cope with this, AT&T has moved the Williams site to its Synaptic Hosting service to ensure the necessary processing power and bandwidth is available to meet the demand.

The difference between Synapic Hosting and other on-demand hosting services is that AT&T's servers are logically in the MLPS cloud and physically colocated at network nodes, explained AT&T Australia sales manager Martin Creighan. Thus the processing actually takes place at the network nodes.

Prior to this weekend's Melbourne Grand Prix (the second round of the 2010 season), the Williams site had already served 312,000 visitors and one million page views since the beginning of the year.

Synaptic Hosting isn't the only AT&T service picked up by Williams this year - see page 2.