Supermarket uses Akamai to achieve 90% offload of 120Mb/s traffic in its Christmas 2010 online loyalty card campaign

Supermarket uses Akamai to achieve 90% offload of 120Mb/s traffic in its Christmas 2010 online loyalty card campaign

Tesco is using the Akamai Dynamic Site Accelerator service to support the company’s 2010 Clubcard Bonanza, which is offering millions of pounds of customer’s Tesco Clubcard vouchers doubled-up through the special online promotion.

When setting up the campaign, Tesco was aware that issuing the two million “double-up vouchers” for customers use to double their points online was likely to generate high levels of traffic to its origin website. The team responsible for the website felt additional capacity would be needed to cover the campaign period and avoid the risk of any outages, as well as maintain the performance of the overall website. Having looked at internet service providers and discovered that they couldn’t support the kind of bandwidth Tesco needed, the company turned to Akamai for assistance.

Adding extra capacity

“Having used Akamai previously we know that it would be straightforward to plug Akamai’s service into our website to take the load from our infrastructure and provide the support we needed, no matter how much traffic visited our website,” said Ed Camp, head of server and storage at Tesco.com. “Having first approached Akamai, it took just eight hours for the service to be put in place and we have been delighted with the results. It has given us the peace of mind that customers taking advantage of this promotion can do so while enjoying great online service and security.”

The campaign is still running, but peak traffic has so far reached 120Mb per second, with Akamai’s Dynamic Site Accelerator service offloading 90% of this from the Tesco servers.