Imagine this scenario: an online promotion takes off at a large retailing web site and its technical manager wants to assign more computing power to respond to a traffic spike of shoppers rushing to the site. It's about as easy as moving a family into a new house. It would probably take more than a day. And meanwhile, the site’s customers are waiting. With FlexiScale additional servers can be launched in less than a minute.

When tax-filing day looms near, financial applications run into massive peaks of demand as tens of thousands of users rush to get their returns in at the last minute. An application suddenly has to process as many as 60 returns a second and can take hours, instead of the usual minutes, to send confirmation to the anxious user that the transaction has gone through. The application owner needs data centres with the capacity necessary to handle the extreme spike in traffic and the vast majority of that installed capacity will go unused most of the time. With FlexiScale cloud computing, you can automatically provision new servers in minutes then shut them down once the peak is over making a massive saving on hardware investment.

There are many similar scenarios that can benefit from FlexiScale’s on demand cloud computing power – digital broadcast media, ticket sales for music festivals, sporting fixtures, special one-off events, online travel or retail businesses. FlexiScale means massive peace of mind in all these situations as you know that it will enable your site to scale up and down automatically in minutes to cope with surges in users.

Accelerate a research project

A university group collects up to 500GB of telescopic imaging every night. These images have to be grouped into catalogues containing billions of objects that must be uploaded, cross-referenced and heavily indexed to enable research astronomers to ask useful and complex data mining queries. The speed of research is closely tied to the speed the data can be catalogued and mined, so such a highly demanding process requires a powerful yet flexible technology.

With FlexiScale they can tap into as much computing power as they need on a utility basis. That means there’s no need for capital investment and they can accelerate productivity for the duration of their project. When it’s complete they can switch off their virtual dedicated server or even shut it down over a holiday period. It’s truly Cloud Computing on-demand.