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IBM BLADE SERVERS ACE AT AUSTRALIAN OPEN

IT staff from the governing tennis bodies of the four Grand-Slam events will be assessing how its technology additions have coped as the Australian Open moves into the business end of the tournament this week.

Snap-together blade servers, piloted at last year's U.S. Open, were used for the first time at this year's Australian Open to run the results system. The scoring system, owned by IBM, has been supplied to Tennis Australia for the past 12 years on a utility computing basis.

Tennis Australia needs to ramp up its IT infrastructure to over 70 times its regular capacity to support the event.

"For the rest of the year we would use next to none of the infrastructure," said Chris Simpfendorfer, Tennis Australia's IT manager.

It is common at all tennis Grand Slams -- the Australian and U.S. Opens, Roland Garros and Wimbledon -- that new technology is tested each year.

Simpfendorfer said he was in regular contact with his tennis IT counterparts. "We share what is learned."

A wireless network was used for the first time at this year's Open for media representatives. About 300 journalists were given access to the network.

The technology was tested at Wimbledon last year by about 30 members of the media.

Simpfendorfer said trials were under way to improve the time it takes for scoring information to update on the Open's Web site.

The IBM blade servers collect data on everything that happens on the court -- every fault, ace, winner, error, forehand, backhand and serve speed -- and information from umpires, statisticians and court-side radar guns.

This information is then fed to on-court scoreboards, the official website, graphics systems for broadcasters, the Open intranet, closed-circuit TV and displays throughout the grounds.

"We have seen no decrease in performance using the blade servers," he said. "You would think a lot of load on one server would impact another, but it doesn't."

Simpfendorfer has been so impressed with the performance of the blades that the organization is considering using blades for the company's administration system.

"The administration system is aged and speced out," he said.

It runs about a dozen IBM severs for the administration system and is looking to consolidate downsize to one rack.

IBM also provided an on-demand server capacity for its Netpoll application where customers can choose different server platforms in the computing network and access virtual server processing, data storage and resources.

Automation technology was put to use redirecting surplus capacity during demand fluctuations on the Australian Open Web site to other projects, such as Analytics Acceleration, a financial services Grid offering that handles credit analysis and an IBM Research project doing protein-folding experiments.