Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games

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More than 3 billion people worldwide are expected to tune in to the Vancouver 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games that will be held at various locations including Whistler, a town near Vancouver in the Canadian province of British Columbia. As the athletes and city get ready, the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games (VANOC) is also preparing. VANOC — responsible for planning, organizing, and staging the events — required technology infrastructure to handle daily operations as well as share real-time data with billions worldwide.

VANOC needed to deploy a complex IT infrastructure — including 15 networked venues, three datacenters, an integration test lab, and multiple business applications — within two years. With the world watching and competitors separated by fractions of a second, technology failure would be unacceptable. VANOC required highly reliable products to provide storage and support for mission-critical systems and a variety of operating systems including UNIX and Windows. It also needed storage capacity for more than 100 TB of data and the ability to keep 10,000 media outlets up-to-date with real-time sports statistics and other information. VANOC planned to implement and manage the infrastructure with Atos Origin, the worldwide IT partner of the Olympic Games. With VANOC's oversight, Atos Origin would be the lead integrator responsible for managing, designing, integrating, and monitoring the security of the 2010 Winter Games.

In December 2007, VANOC announced that Sun Microsystems of Canada was selected as the Official Computer Network Server Supplier for the 2010 Winter Games. VANOC had looked at multiple vendors, evaluating solutions for reliability, cost, speed-to-deployment and how well the vendors themselves would integrate with existing Olympic Games IT partners and services. VANOC selected Sun Canada because of the reliability of its servers and its track record in supporting major sporting organizations such as the National Hockey League and past Games, including NBCOlympics.com for the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing and the Salt Lake 2002 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games. With its successful history of supplying the Games with UNIX-based servers, it made sense for Sun to provide a solution that would include support for Windows as well. It was also important that Sun shared VANOC’s commitment to environmental sustainability and energy efficiency.

VANOC deployed a combination of 125 Sun SPARC Enterprise and 475 Sun Fire AMD and Intel-based x64 servers and Sun StorageTek storage products for the core systems that will facilitate the 2010 Winter Games. One key solution — the Vancouver 2010 Information Diffusion System (IDS) developed by Atos Origin, the Worldwide IT Partner of the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games — will run on energy-efficient Sun SPARC Enterprise servers, including the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220 server featuring CoolThreads technology and the Solaris 10 Operating System. IDS will be used to compile and distribute real-time data such as scoring and timing results to athletes, officials, commentators, and media. For example, information collected from sensors on a downhill ski run will be relayed through Sun servers for worldwide distribution over the Internet. Systems based on Sun Fire X4100 servers and the Windows operating system will be used to manage attendee accreditation, calendars, and other Core Games Management Systems developed by Atos Origin, as well as to handle VANOC’s daily business operations.

The Committee is also using Sun software. In addition to the Solaris Operating System, VANOC is using Solaris Cluster 3.2 software to ensure server availability, and it deployed Sun StorageTek QFS software to handle data management across its heterogenous network. VANOC is also running Sun Java System Web Server 7.0 and Sun Java System Directory Server 6 to support online services.

The build-out began in September 2007 and continued in stages until completed in July 2009. Atos Origin expects to finish system tests by September, well in advance of the Games in February 2010. It will continue with technical and operational rehersals until December 2009. During the Games, Sun Professional Services and Atos Origin will work together with all the other Technology Partners in the Technology Operation Center (TOC) to support overall Games operations. The TOC houses systems management and monitoring equipment.

In addition, Sun Professional Services helped with installation by providing expertise in storage, performance, and security. SunSpectrum services is also providing ongoing support. By taking advantage of Sun Professional Services and the Sun Customer Ready Program to simplify deployment with factory-integrated systems, VANOC has been able to meet aggressive deadlines and cut costs. VANOC also saved by consolidating applications and reducing the number of servers it would need by approximately 30%, and expects to realize ongoing savings with the energy-efficient Sun systems.

VANOC has already gained $100 million from tickets and $500 thousand from merchandise in online sales hosted on Sun servers. “With Sun, we have a trusted partner that can evaluate our architecture and make changes to improve performance and service-level agreements,” says Barry Caswell, Director of IT Operations and Security at Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games. “It’s really about collaborating and overlaying Sun’s expertise in server and storage platforms over what we want to achieve.”