For the past thirteen years, IBM has been the official information technology
provider for the United States Tennis Association's flagship event, the US
Open. The USTA needs to provide online fans and broadcasters with a differentiated
Web experience. Also, since Web traffic peaks around the month of the championship,
it needs a scalable and flexible infrastructure to help align its cost structure
with its highly seasonal business model. With help from IBM On Demand Business
solutions, the US Open can now deliver real-time information—instantaneously—to
millions of online fans and broadcasters around the world. From automatically
delivering updated point-by-point scores, aces, first-serve percentages,
etc., fans, the press and other key groups will have a wealth of real-time
information at their fingertips. Using instant infrastructure from IBM, the
USTA has turned the ultimate sense and respond sport into the ultimate sense-and-respond
business.
How they became an on demand business
Services
The solutions for the US Open site were designed and developed by IBM Global
Services, including IBM Business Consulting Services, comprised of Application
Management Services, e-business Hosting, and IBM SurfAid Analytics.
Software
IBM WebSphere® Business Integration Event Broker enables real-time score distribution
using a robust publish/subscribe message broker to publish real-time scores to
HTML pages without the need to refresh the whole page - speeding downloads, while
also lowering bandwidth demands and lowering costs. IBM WebSphere Portal Content
Publisher is used by the USTA editors, writers, photographers, and audio/video
specialists. It has a customized approval process and enables the publisher and
approver/s to be based in different locations. WebSphere Application Server is
built on open standards-based technology, and is used for the HTTP serving, as
well as the NetPoll and Feedback Applications. Tivoli Management Software provides
extensive application and hardware platform monitoring for the entire events
infrastructure. IBM Tivoli Intelligent Think Dynamics Orchestrator permits autonomic
provisioning between different applications, on different servers. Using predictive
modelling, the system automatically allocates server capacity to where it is
needed, helping to improve utilization rates and cost-effectiveness. WebSphere
MQ is used to provide the scores and statistics to the Internet audience. It
allows only changed data to be sent, and logs information, so any network distribution
can ensure that no data is lost.
Servers
At the core of the technology are IBM iSeries servers running Linux on Power,
IBM xSeries servers running Linux, IBM pSeries servers running AIX. A single
eServer i5 520 will run the Internet Scoring system and the Web site Staging
server on Linux (SLES 9) in separate LPARs and the Publisher on Linux (SLES 8)
on an IXA attached xSeries. The eServer i5 520 will be used to manage the CPU
and memory for the Internet Scoring system and the Web site staging server and
managing the disk for all of the systems. Multiple geographically dispersed server "farms" are
virtualized as one, and used to handle the substantial increase in traffic to
the Web site during the tournament. This component of the solution provides the
USTA with a scalable, highly responsive infrastructure that compliments their
existing systems, without the USTA having to make a large capital investment
in a permanent infrastructure that would be under-utilized 11 months of the year.
More about this story
 USOpen.org
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