Moonpig

The Company

moonpig.com is the UK's leading online personalised greetings card company, while their Australian operation is small but growing. Amongst the huge range of cards on offer, you will also find many of the most popular greeting cards designs found in stores. You can personalise the caption and the inside to create a unique card.

The cards are printed in moonpig.com's production facility in Sydney and sent directly to the customer or sent directly the recipient. The UK website was launched in 2000 and has grown spectacularly in the number of customer's and range of products. The Australian and American sites soon followed.

The IT challenge

moonpig.com came to us when their success meant they were outgrowing their server infrastructure. With a television advertising campaign about to launch, and a service that peaks dramatically at certain times of the year, they urgently needed a new high-performance platform to ensure the service was running smoothly at all times.

Their success was attracting denial-of-service attacks, where a large number of hijacked PCs are used to visit a web site simultaneously, stressing the servers until they grind to a halt. For similar reasons, the server platform needed to be highly resilient against hardware failure, which could also be disastrous.

The Conosco solution

Conosco designed and built a new platform based on blade servers and SAN storage, with a VMWare virtual server platform for flexibility alongside traditional physical servers.

Blade servers offer high capacity for minimum rack space and energy consumption, as well as allowing defective components to be swapped out without stopping the service.

Virtualisation provides highly efficient use and sharing of physical server hardware, it also allows instant failover to different hardware, if there's a physical failure, and lets us test and add new servers easily.

The SAN also gives the servers great flexibility, allowing the instant provisioning of storage to any server, whilst retaining the simplicity of only one storage platform to manage (rather than having data spread over many servers).

Conosco also added high-end Cisco firewalls and IPS appliances to control denial-of-service attacks and to prevent and detect security breaches. The network and servers now fully resilient against hardware failure.

The new infrastructure has almost tripled the moonpig.com’s capacity and has supported its incredible growth.

The client's experience

“With Conosco's experience and expertise in a wide range of technologies we were able to grow at a rapid rate. Since the beginning of their involvement, our website systems availability has been improved to the highest level. Conosco have been very professional in their approach and have made our experience of IT ‘effortless’ indeed.”

James Henson IT Director,

moonpig.com Ltd.

www.moonpig.com