Building the Sydney 2000 network

SYDNEY: Over 10,0000 athletes from 200-odd countries will come together to

compete in 300 medal events at 39 different competition venues at the Sydney

2000 Olympic Games about a month from now. If these figures boggle you, check

these out. Approximately 7,300 PCs, 540 servers and 845 network switches have

been deployed at the Games, along with the 13 million lines of code that is

being written. And all this networking has taken close to two years, with

approximately 4,500 technical and non-technical people working day in and day

out.

IBM has deployed this marathon project and the network management is done

using Tivoli software. As the Worldwide Information Technology Partner for the

Games, IBM is responsible for the Games’ systems development and operations,

development of the official Sydney 2000 Games Web site and desktop hardware,

software and support for back office and headquarters location of the Sydney

Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games (SOCOG). It might not be out of place

to mention here that IBM has been managing the IT infrastructure of the Olympic

Games for the past 40 years. But the level and scale of automation this year is

by far the highest.

As Tivoli Systems Inc. is a subsidiary of IBM, its technology management

software is being used at the Games. Tivoli systems are being used for software

distribution, network management, storage management, distributed monitoring and

performance data collection. In fact, as Tivoli Systems GM (Australia/New

Zealand) Steve Burke says, "IT management at the Games is quite similar to

the deployment required for a company’s IT environment. Many issues such as

data back-up and recovery, process control, change management, security and

maintaining a stable environment are the basic management issues that a regular

company might face–especially within e-business."

Tivoli software will be used to manage the Internet systems that allow fans

around the world access venues and event details, country results and team

highlights. Alongside, Tivoli software will also manage the network of PCs and

servers provided to Games officials and Olympics staff to relay and record

important information including competition results, athlete information and

mail services. According to Burke, the next big thing that he can compare with

the Olympics project is the Y2K operation.

As part of the solution, IBM has developed the Games Information Retrieval

System, an intranet, officially known as INFO. Used exclusively by Olympic

Family members (who in fact number close to 2,60,000!), INFO provides Games

information, such as event schedules and results, athlete biographies, news,

weather and transportation. They can also use INFO to send e-mail. Two thousand

INFO workstations will be located throughout the Olympic village and competition

venues to support the Family members.

In addition to managing the INFO network connectivity and the availability of

two other core systems–the Games Results System and the Games Management

Systems. The Results System captures results for the 300 medal events and 39

different competition venues, and distributes them to numerous destinations,

including Olympic Games judges, scoreboards, the media and the Internet. The

Central Results Systems, which is a part of the Games Results System, receives

competition information from the Venue Results applications and distributes it

to 15,000 media services via more than 700 printers. The Games Management

Systems manage the logistical, administrative and operational activities around

the Olympic Village, the 39 competition venues and other non-competition venues

(e.g., hotels, etc).

The Commentator Information System, available for 10 Olympic sports, operates

under an OS/2 WARP and OS/2 server platform. It provides international

broadcasters with real-time competition information directly from the venue

databases, enabling them to bring their audiences timely coverage right from the

play field.

Tivoli is also managing the official Games Web site, www.olympics.com,

which is expected to have a record number of one billion hits a day. The Web

site receives information from multiple sources and in various forms, such as

text, photographs and graphics and then must quickly make sure that the

information is available on multiple servers throughout the world. As and when

result feeds become available, data is generated from the field of play and the

Web site pages that IBM develops will become dynamic as the data itself.

Tivoli NetView for OS/390 will provide the focal point for the Olympic Games

structure. NetView provides a view of business systems, applications, middleware

and database components at the Olympic venues. Said Burke, "If any one of

the thousands of devices is not functioning on the network, we get to know that

immediately and can fix it remotely." It also provides a platform

independent operator interface that provides the primary host and distributed

views of business applications. The Tivoli Enterprise Console will provide the

mid-level management view of non-critical events originating from short-lived

applications.