Frank's Blog: 1st Event Registration – How Boring Was That?

[FrankJ]

Registration 2015: The Blog

1st Event Registration – How Boring Was That?
Blog Date:
Friday, September 26, 2014 - 10:17

Remember the old days during 1st event registration when you’d make your selection, click the button, and hope for the best? You never knew what would happen, or even if anything would happen. The last few years, and this year particularly, seems like it’s more click and go. Where’s the excitement in that? :-)

Our crack IT staff once again this year upped the system resources available for registration. For those interested in the details, changes from last year were:

New VMware server cluster that increased the CPU core count and doubled the available system memory
Additional monitoring capabilities with three products. We can now retain historical data for the network, VMware, and the storage systems. The new software also increases system visibility through alerting and reporting
Eight new Lasso servers running on a 64 bit operating system. Lasso was also upgraded to take advantage of the new servers. Our IT development team worked to tune these servers to take advantage of the new hardware, operating system, and software

During peak load just after registration opened, CPUs were running at 35%.

[The huge registration monitors in the IT offices shortly after registration opened. Donut for scale. Happy IT folks (out of shot) sing, eat pizza, and organize an after-hours celebratory caber toss]

More information for you:

Number of teams registered or waitlisted in first 15 minutes:

For 2014 season: 903
For 2015 season: 1,081

Number of teams registered or waitlisted in first 12 hours:

For 2014 season: 1,577
For 2015 season: 1,796

I’d like to thank our IT staff, our Customer Service staff, and our Youth Protection Program staff for making sure we were ready for the big day. I’d also like to thank you, our teams – we recognize there were some new and unfamiliar steps in the process this year, but you came through. By the time registration opened at Noon Eastern time, over 2,000 FRC teams were ‘green to go’!

We’re off to a great start!

Frank