Tatts mulls opening datacentre to charity

Gambling organisation Tatts is considering donating its spare datacentre capacity to charitable organisations, as opposed to large cash donations, according to CTO Matthew Maw.

As a gambling company, Tatts is used to requiring tremendous capacity for its datacentres in short bursts, particularly when the lottery jackpot is high or most notably in the lead up to the Melbourne Cup in November every year.

Maw said at the CiscoLive! conference in Melbourne today that the company could not consider offering the spare capacity in the quiet times out on a commercial basis, because it'd be difficult to sell it on the basis that it wouldn't be available during Tatts' peak time. However, Maw said that there was another option the company was considering.

"Where we are potentially using our infrastructure more effectively is to charitable organisations," he said.

He said that instead of giving hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations to charity organisations as it would normally do, Tatts was looking at donating that much in computing power in the company's datacentres.

"That sort of thing says we can meet our corporate and social responsibility and use our capacity more effectively," he said.

More generally, Maw said Tatts was not interested in moving to a public cloud, simply because it would be difficult to make sure that availability was high enough to protect the company from losses in the case of down time in a peak period like the Melbourne Cup.

He said that while an hour of downtime may not seem like much for a 24-hour business, in Melbourne Cup season, Tatts processes around 1000 transactions a second, with the average bet being around $15. For that reason, Maw said the company would, for now, stick to a private cloud environment.

Josh Taylor travelled to Melbourne as a guest of Cisco.