Business

It is an Olympic champion in Sochi

THE Winter Olympics Games in Sochi ended on Sunday, and we congratulate everyone who took part, especially our very own gold medallist in the Super G, Kelly Gallagher from Bangor.

But surely the very fact these games ever took place in this often called greenfield site of Sochi, is a success story all of its own.

I say greenfield site in terms of IT, as never before has a complete IT infrastructure been required to be built from the ground up for an Olympic Games venue. In the past there has always been (to varying degrees) an existing stable communication platform for the Olympic IT infrastructure to build upon.

For the first time, these games boasted two separate main computer data centres. When the core Olympic IT team and the Organising Committee first went to Russia in 2010 to define the requirements for physical equipment, they had to base the games management systems over 1,600 km away in Moscow, as the Sochi site was not ready.

The results systems required a separate data centre at the technology operations centre in Sochi, which they didn't start building until December 2011.

The Sochi Olympic computer data centre was fully operational by May 2012. In addition, all the individual venues had their own standalone mini-data centre to process results on-site. It's a strict International Olympic Committee (IoC) requirement that the results for each venue have to be delivered locally.

With a multitude of sensors monitoring athletes' every twist and turn, and hundreds of physical servers to process the results data in real time - pumping it out to venues, broadcasters, subscribers and a cloud-based website serving information to some eight billion devices - these were the most data-intensive games ever staged.

The requirement of data that was continually transferred was breathtaking. Results from systems across 14 sporting venues, including all the games management systems, for security officials, volunteers and logistical operations such as human resources all had to run seamlessly.

Results systems generated more than 15TB of data every day, a figure that some IT experts suggest is the equivalent of every spectator in the Adler speed-skating Arena, with a seating capacity of 12,000, tweeting once a minute for the next 27 years!

The IT engineers and programmers known in the Olympic organisation as business technologists grew from around 100 in the early stages to a staggering 3,000 on-site during the games.

Altogether the datacentre systems comprised of 400 physical computer servers (yes 400) running software for "virtualisation", disaster recovery and remote access management. However, despite the increased workloads and performance, that was less than half the number that had been deployed in the Vancouver Winter Olympics four years ago.

In all, getting the systems ready for the games has involved around 100,000 hours of testing, and so far the reports from everyone involved in Sochi suggest they have performed very well.

Technology now underpins almost every aspect of the Games: cross-country skiers are tracked by GPS technology, while speed skaters' times are measured to the nearest thou sandth of a second using light beams on the surface of the ice at the finish line.

Omega, the official time keeping partner, says by the end of the games it will have measure more than 650,000 distances, times and scores during the Games, using 230 tonnes of timekeeping, scoring and data-handling equipment.

Of course it's customary at every sporting event to say something like: "These games would not be the success they were if it was not for the officials, athletes, journalists and spectators" - and in terms of IT they were not forgotten either.

At Sochi, in regards to smart phones and mobile devices, the provision for up to 120,000 bandwidth-hungry devices on site per day - equivalent to three gadgets per person - was catered for.

Now that people can stream video on mobile and tablet devices, provision was made for networks to cope with a tenfold increase in data volumes compared to four years ago in Vancouver.

The 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics and Paralympics will go down in history as the most data-intensive and networked Games ever.

* Trevor Bingham is business relationship manager at MCS Group (editorial@mscgroup.co.uk)

* SUPER-G(IGABYTES): Bangor skier Kelly Gallagher, right, and her guide Charlotte Evans raced to gold in the ladies' Super-G at the 2014 Winter Paralympic Games in Sochi earlier this month. Images and footage of their achievement would have reached all corners of the world via all manners of device in what was the most data-intensive and networked Games ever

PICTURE: AP