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The National Archives

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NetBenefit_Case_Study_The_National_Archives.pdf

The National Archives is the UK government’s official archive, containing 900 years of history from the Domesday Book to the present day. Increasingly, these records are being put online, making them universally accessible.

“Without NetBenefit’s infrastructure, we would not have been able to meet the record levels of interest generated by this project. They really helped us deliver the unknown.”
David Thomas, chief information officer, The National Archives

The National Archives knew its plan to offer people the chance to download UFO files free for one month would bring thousands of extra visitors to the website. In the face of such a large increase in traffic volumes, there was a real danger the website would simply crash, leaving UFO fans around the world frustrated and disappointed.

NetBenefit was chosen from a range of possible providers because of its experience in creating flexible solutions to fit clients’ business needs. With just a few days to go before the news story broke, the NetBenefit team worked fast to design and put in place a secure, load balanced, single site solution, with firewalls set to active-active for maximum throughput and high availability.

The National Archives needed a resilient hosting solution that could handle the traffic surge and deal with huge bandwidth demands during the month that the files were free to download. The short-term contract with NetBenefit enabled the website to support the necessary 55Mbps and cope with an astonishing 5 terabytes of data transfer in the first week.

At a glance

  • Peaks in demand handled by Content Delivery Network (CDN)
  • Fast to deploy CDN meant service was up and running within days
  • Over 5 terabytes of data transfer in 5 days
  • Professional technical support 24x7