Olympic Park 2012

The internet has become such an essential part of our life, that I find it quite hard to believe that only the last 4 Olympics actually had a website – that is Atlanta ‘96, Sydney ‘00, Athens ‘04, and Beijing ‘08 (leaving winter games to one side for the moment). Considering that the first radio broadcast was in 1924 and the first TV coverage was in 1936 (Berlin of Jesse Owens vs Hitler fame), we have waited for a long time for a new medium of coverage.

I hope the ‘Technology Partners’ for the London 2012 Olympic Games (see list below) are ready to go for some really inspirational, efficient and sustainable IT infrastructure.

• Atos origin – Official Worldwide IT Partner to International Olympic and Paralympic Committee
• Samsung – Official Worldwide Wireless Telecommunications Equipment Olympic Partner
• BT – Official Partner to 2012 Olympic Games
• Nortel – Official Partner to 2012 Olympic Games (…but they have fallen prey to the downturn … currently operating under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection …more on that later)

Atos Origin, an international IT services company will be in charge of the IT system that relays results, events and athlete information to spectators and media around the world. It is estimated that games will use c. 900 servers, 1,000 network and security devices, and 8,000 computers, and all applications and equipment will have to undergo loads of testing.

As FT.com reports the supremo at Atos said:

“We are looking to reduce the amount of hardware, power consumption, air conditioning and space needed,” said Michele Hyron, Atos Origin’s chief integrator for the Olympics. The Beijing Games required some 10,000 computers and 50m sheets of paper. Ms Hyron said she hoped to reduce these levels “dramatically” in London.”

Atos needs to be bold, and to be encouraged to be so. The contract it now holds with the International Olympic Committee is the world’s largest IT-related sports contract covering the Athens 2004, Torino 2006, Beijing 2008, Vancouver 2010 and London 2012. So it clearly has the confidence of the IOC, but apparently they are still not sure about server virtualisation.

“Atos and the Olympic committee are still evaluating, for example, whether or not to use server virtualisation – a fairly established technique for cutting computer power consumption – at the Games.”  FT.com

Server virtualisation uses one physical server across multiple virtual machines, that can run in isolated operating environments and applications. This reduces need for hardware, power cooling etc.  Nice article by someone who knows much much more than me. It is a young technology and not normally used for large scale ops. but perhaps this is the opportunity to take it to the next stage. If they can do it, it would be nice and maybe that could even be one more ‘legacy’ of the UK games.

So far construction crews are using IT applications inside a virtualised environment, and there is the promise to improve on Beijing in other ways.

“The London Games will also make greater use of remote information systems than any previous Olympics, streaming real-time results and coverage to broadcasters around the world and offering a single feed of all Olympics news. The tech is aimed at reducing unnecessary travel by journalists and using less paper than the 2008 Beijing Olympics, where seven million sheets were printed out.” ZDNet.co.uk