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A dozen or so million viewers, 156 million views, 750 thousand unique users – last year’s statistics of the Finale of the Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity (WOSP) are impressive. At that time, Atman services provided uninterrupted and secure communication with Internet users and TV viewers. Also this year, Atman will be responsible for providing Internet links to the studio and quick access to the Foundation’s website during the Grand Finale.

The organization of such an undertaking as the Grand Finale of the Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity is extremely demanding not only in terms of logistics but also in terms of technology. This is perfectly illustrated by last year’s statistics. The challenge is not only to handle the rapidly growing traffic, but also to properly secure the infrastructure. Last year, during the Finale of the Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity, a few minor cyber incidents occurred, but they did not inflict any damage as the Orchestra’s infrastructure was well secured. This year, the organizers reached for the same, proven solutions. Atman, the operator of the largest data center in Poland and a longtime partner of the Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity, will guarantee the Internet connection of the Orchestra with the world and constant availability of the Orchestra’s website irrespective of the number of Internet users storming the Foundation’s servers at the same time. The company also assists in preparations to the Finale.

“For the time of the upcoming 26th Finale of the Great Orchestra we have set up internet connections with a capacity of 2×10 Gbps for the studio on plac Defilad and two connections with identical bandwidth for the website of the Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity. Moreover, we have set up 2×1 Gbps Internet connections dedicated exclusively to service the auction system and live presentation of the course of the auction in the Finale studio,” explains Robert Szczeblewski, project manager at Atman, for several years responsible for providing Atman services to the Orchestra’s Foundation.

As last year, the CloudFlare system provided by Atman will help to ensure constant availability and security of the Foundation’s website. In addition to monitoring traffic and blocking potentially dangerous queries, CloudFlare uses a distributed delivery system (Content Delivery Network) that significantly reduces the load on the relevant web servers. The Orchestra’s server load is relieved by taking over most of the queries by CloudFlare and serving static content from the CDN server network. Thanks to this, few queries reach the Orchestra’s servers directly, and Internet users enjoy fast loading of the Orchestra’s website even at peak traffic. Last year, CloudFlare took over 98% of queries, thus reducing the direct data transfer from the Orchestra’s server by nearly 7 TB, which allowed to avoid a situation where the site could get suspended and be temporarily unavailable.

“Last year, during the 25th Grand Finale, the website of the Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity was visited by 725,000 Internet users, and the number of views reached 156 million. It is worth noting that as many as 152 million have been serviced by CloudFlare. The solution allowed for quick and trouble-free access to the website to both users from Poland and abroad. A year ago, 7.3 million views were generated by users from the United Kingdom, 3.2 million from Germany, 1.4 million from the USA, and over a million views from the Netherlands were also recorded. We expect that this year the number of foreign users may be even greater,” adds Robert Szczeblewski from Atman.

It is worth mentioning that during this year’s Finale people who are interested in supporting the Orchestra’s goal, namely the achievement of equal opportunities in the treatment of newborns, will be offered over 20 different ways to transfer donations via electronic channels. Atman will provide two phone numbers in VoIP technology, which will be used to conduct the auction in the Finale Studio.

As part of the support provided before the events of the 26th Grand Finale, website load tests were carried out to verify the access to it which used 3 dedicated servers of Atman. The Warsaw company also made available office space for the needs of the Orchestra. As in 2017, one of the rooms of the backup offices located at the Atman’s campus at Grochowska street served to organize training for volunteers responsible for conducting telephone conversations with donors during the Finale.