A joint venture between Betfair UK and Publishing and Broadcasting Limited, Betfair Pty Ltd. allows individuals to exchange bets on sporting and other events, and, as such, has a very high transaction load.

With the data center complete, Betfair imported three 24-way Sun E6900 servers from the U.K. for the Oracle database backend and about 55 AMD Opteron-based Sun "pizza boxes" for the mid-tier and Web infrastructure.

Moss said choosing Opteron was a "simple decision" to make because data center space in Hobart and cooling is expensive, and the dynamics of Betfair's Web tier is better suited to small boxes rather than one big box.

"You can actually feel less heat coming from the [Opteron] servers despite equivalent performance to Intel machines," Moss said when comparing the heat output from AMD and Intel systems.

Betfair has been running Linux on its Web tier for the past three years and Moss said it is performing "very well". The company has 25 of the Opteron servers running Red Hat Enterprise 4 with the JBoss J2EE middleware.