Cloud high lob at Australian Open with IBM

Peter Dinham
Wednesday, 18 January 2012 01:10

The Australian Open grand slam tennis tournament is underway in Melbourne, and IBM is leveraging a global private cloud computing system for this year's event which allows organisers, Tennis Australia, to rapidly scale its data in real time, as well as guarantee continuous availability even in the event of a complete data centre outage.

The IBM private cloud is a virtualised environment hosted in three US-based data centres ensuring uninterrupted access to content from the Open for millions of fans, broadcasters and players worldwide.

'All our tennis fans are important to us, whether they are at the event or watching from home, and we want to give a connected experience for the Australian Open,' Samir Mahir, CIO, Tennis Australia said. 'The private cloud solution provides the necessary volume of Australian Open data to anyone in the world at any time, without any excess demand affecting its quality or availability. This means fans can expect real-time access to more dynamic content even during the busiest periods of the competition.'

IBM has already leveraged the private cloud at other tennis Grand Slams to meet the scalability and data integrity needs of organisers in the USA, UK and France. For the Australian Open, IBM has virtualised much of the tournament's data infrastructure and server migration, giving Tennis Australia more flexible technology solutions which can scale up and down to meet the changing demands from fans.

According to Mahir, 'elasticity of computing power is critical when you're dealing with audiences of such a significant tournament.' 'For most of the year Tennis Australia is a small and medium size business, but for two weeks every January we host the Australian Open and become a large global enterprise.

'We need to be able to rapidly adjust to the number of fans accessing our digital content and their changing interests throughout the competition. IBM's private cloud lets us meet these peaks and troughs throughout the design, testing and live phases of the Australian Open in a flexible and cost-effective way. This year we will benefit from being able to provision a new web server in less than three minutes and move a live application workload from one IBM POWER System to another in less than four minutes.'

Sarah Cole, IBM's Australian Open project lead, said IBM continues to work with organisers to raise the level of match and player data available to spectators around the world. Cole said the Australian Open features an enhanced IBM SlamTracker, a live scoring and analysis tool that delivers match stats across all courts, with live text commentary and a momentum visualiser for featured matches.

'SlamTracker applies IBM business analytics technology to examine over 39 million data points across seven years of Grand Slam championships, finding patterns and styles for players when they win. This knowledge is compared to an opponent's patterns and style to determine the keys to the match for each player.' Cole said IBM had added an Android smartphone application to its existing iPhone app for the Open, delivering live scores, highlights and news to even more mobile users, and all of IBM's front-end services will interface directly with the private cloud to provide a 'consistently rich data experience regardless of platform.'

Cole said 2012 marks the nineteenth year of IBM's role as Official Technology Partner of the Australian Open. 'One of the hallmarks of the partnership with Tennis Australia has been the successful adoption of technology innovation to enrich the Australian Open experience for players, fans and organisers. Our investment in new technologies has made Grand Slam tennis one of the most sophisticated spectator sports in the world.'