According to Disney's internal tracking, the site reached a daily record with 3.17 million visitors, increasing traffic to Disney.com by 37 percent on June 23. It received 860,000 video plays for the one-day event.

Albers says the day-long event allowed them to prove "beyond a shadow of a doubt" the scalability of a virtualization scheme, which will continue to be a huge advantage to them for future events where huge spikes in online traffic are anticipated, like during the presidential election. "Going forward we're now very well positioned to leverage growing this environment."

Melanie Posey, a research director at consultancy IDC, agrees. Major events that will have mass appeal require a flexible architecture and the ability to reallocate existing server capacity. "That's the advantage of virtualization technology,'' she says; using a combination of load balancing and CDN and corralling underused servers. "Having the ability to reallocate server capacity that already exists is a lot easier and more time efficient for the company that's providing the content,'' says Posey, "than going out and getting a physical server and installing it and configuring it."

© 2009 CXO Media Inc.