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Ensuring Uptime At The Games

Business continuity is a hot topic in the corporate world, and it's certainly on the minds of those running IT at the Olympics. If systems go down or network outages occur, failure to have suitable contingencies could spell big trouble for Games organizers.

Atos Origin, the IT services firm that is managing technology at the Summer Olympics in Beijing, has made business continuity one of its priorities in designing the technology architecture supporting the Games.

"The architecture of the Games IT systems has been designed to achieve a high level of availability across all competition and noncompetition venues," says Jeremy Hore, chief integrator at Atos Origin for the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games.

To ensure that high level of reliability, all critical systems in operation at the Games use a combination of clustering, server farms, and load balancing, Hore says. "As we are integrating many different hardware and software components, there are a variety of vendor products which are used," although he didn't specify the vendors.

Technology glitches at previous Olympics have lead to problems such as the inability to feed competition results into official Web sites and media outlets.

Chinese security officials have expressed concerns in the past about individuals and groups of hackers attacking systems during the Olympics.

Atos Origin worked with the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad (BOCOG) to design an IT backbone that will stand up to virtually any problems that might arise.

The company has the advantage of having managed IT systems and networks at previous Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah (2002), Athens (2004), and Torino, Italy (2006). It also has performed countless hours of testing in Beijing to ensure systems reliability. These trials involved multiple simulated conditions, including a flood, a network disconnection, and a power failure.

The sporting events at the Beijing Games will be held over a period of 17 days and for about 18 hours per day. Dedicated IT systems and services that will support everything from ticketing to media accreditation to wireless communications have been designed to protect against data corruption and data deletion, provide high availability of applications to eliminate any single point of failure in the architecture through elaborate redundancies, and guarantee a fast and secure information recovery process.

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