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Discussing the United States' natural and man-made disaster preparedness evolution. The article includes comments from Peter Doolan, vice president and chief technology officer, Oracle Public Sector discussing how preparedness consists of organizational

At IRCE 2013: 50% of the organization's site traffic during the weather disasters came from mobile devices, says Craig Oldham, vice president of digital engagement for American Red Cross. The nonprofit group last year built a single e-commerce platform based on Oracle Corp.'s ATG Web Commerce On Demand.

...Web traffic reached 30 times its normal volume immediately after Hurricane Sandy, says Red Cross vice president of information technology Suzanne Hall. By the time the ensuing telethon kicked into action, there were moments when the organization was processing up to 75,000 donations simultaneously through its website, a rate of up to 22 transactions per second. "A lot of the times, we'll geo-target the site so that they can immediately see what might be relevant to them," says American Red Cross vp of marketing Craig Oldham. During the height of a disaster, the Red Cross may change personalization rules and content every hour. 

As the East Coast prepared for Superstorm Sandy, the American Red Cross's new cloud platform allowed users in the storm's path to read customized preparedness warnings and shelter information, based on their location, as they checked the organization's homepage. And when Americans reached into their pockets after the storm, a scalable ecommerce platform allowed the organization to handle as many as 75,000 concurrent donations - the most ever. The American Red Cross is merging its 400-500 chapter websites, under a new cloud platform, from Oracle Corp. , that allows the organization to scale up its capacity when a disaster strikes and users are clamoring for preparedness information, Craig Oldham, vice president of digital engagement told CIO Journal. The platform, which the Red Cross began rolling out in August, was already implemented by half its chapters by the time the storm struck. The ability to scale up allowed the Red Cross to handle a peak of more than 500,000 page views per minute, during a NBC telethon to draw donations for the relief effort in early November...

"When large scale disasters happen, it can trigger web site volumes on a scale similar to what retailers experience on Black Friday," said Craig Oldham, VP of Digital Strategy for American Red Cross, in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. 

The November/December issue of Oracle Magazine included an article about how organizations use Oracle Exadata Database Machine for increased efficiency, private cloud solutions, consolidation, and database as a service (DBaaS). The article highlights the University of Minnesota's DBaaS implementation to create its database hotel, which it developed to provide faster, more flexible, and more efficient service to all university departments. The university has two Oracle Exadata Database Machines and Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC) for high availability. It also uses the Data Guard feature for disaster recovery capabilities. The university can now return registration results within seconds, even during peak registration periods, and through centralized IT, it enables departments to manage their own databases.