With a potential one billion people watching, 27 venues to cover
and an estimated nine million printouts for the 17th Commonwealth
Games, IT cannot afford to fail. While Microsoft and XML are new to
this game, they will underpin the event's IT. Murdoch Mactaggart
finds out why
It is almost an axiom of IT projects that deadlines are elastic.
Poor planning or poor project control may be major factors but
large and complex IT projects very often run late or over budget,
or launch with reduced specification and inadequately tested. For
Gerry Pennell, IT director of Manchester 2002, the company formed
from a consortium of local authorities and commercial companies to
manage the 17th Commonwealth Games, having an absolute and fixed
deadline of 25 July concentrates minds wonderfully.
"It's a big deadline," he says, "and it simply can't slip." Any
serious breakdown in the IT infrastructure behind the games is
going to be seen immediately by most of the one billion spectators
worldwide expected to view the games over their 10-day run.
It is the UK's biggest-ever sporting event: on a world scale it is
bigger than the winter Olympics; between a third and half the size
of recent summer Olympics; and bigger than the last Olympics held
in Britain in 1948.
About 5,000 athletes from 72 Commonwealth countries will take part
in 17 sports and win a total of 1,480 medals.
This year, the programme will integrate elite disabled athletes.
Their medals will be counted towards the overall medals tables of
the competing countries. One prominent competitor will be Tanni
Grey-Thompson, holder of 13 gold and other Paralympic medals, a
Great Britain track team member since 1987 and six times winner of
the women's wheelchair race at the London Marathon in April.
Shooting events will take place at Bisley, Surrey, but all the
other events will take place in and around Manchester. There are 27
venues, 17 of them for sporting events.
The recently-built City of Manchester Stadium is the location for
most of the track and field events. This can seat 38,000 people but
once the games are over, the athletics track in the centre will be
replaced with a football pitch and 10,000 seats will be added, and
the stadium will become the home ground of Manchester City
FC.
One of the problems facing Manchester 2002 - and particularly the
IT department - is that it has not been possible to get access to
many of the venues until very shortly before the games begin. The
Manchester Evening News Arena, for instance, site of the boxing
finals and of the netball competitions is in almost constant use
for other events.
"We had three main challenges," explains Pennell. "First, there was
the systems integration challenge - getting the software we needed,
testing it and gluing it all together. Second, there was the
challenge of actually getting the technology into the 27 venues,
particularly where access was restricted. Then, lastly, there's the
challenge of operating it at the high level necessary to give the
support which is essential in an event like this."
Among the early strategic decisions that Pennell took was to keep
things simple, to re-use existing applications where possible and
so avoid needless in-house development and, partly as a
consequence, to standardise on a single technology platform.
Pennell refuses to reveal the IT spend but says it was less than
10% of the $300m (£194m) spent on IT at the Sydney Olympics. IBM is
heavily associated with such sporting events and a combination of
IBM hardware with, in some cases, the GNU/Linux open operating
system, Java 2 Enterprise Edition-based applications and ancillary
tools such as the Apache Web server would seem to have been an
obvious route to follow, both to draw on existing expertise and to
keep costs down.
Yet the technology platform is pure Microsoft, an interesting
approach in the light of recent concerns over costs, security and,
in some quarters, resilience and scalability. According to Pennell,
the IBM/Linux route was evaluated but there were two major
problems.
"Some of the services we needed and, in particular some of the
specialist applications, were only available on a Windows platform
and to move to Unix would have meant a load of undesirable and
expensive porting," he says. "But the second barrier was to do with
IBM internal commercial practices [where] every operating division
has to have a piece of the action for an event like this. At the
Olympics there were AS/400s, RS/6000s, the MVS 360 architecture and
more, and there was very little there that I felt we could
reasonably use.
"Multiple platforms would add to the complexity, and these two
factors meant that approach just was not viable," says
Pennell.
A vitally important part of any sporting event is scoring, timing
competitors and measuring their efforts according to the standards
of the sports involved. This is the responsibility of Swiss Timing,
a specialist scoring company.
The equipment needed differs from sport to sport - that handling
track races being quite distinct from what is needed for, say, the
pole vault. Interestingly, the greatest challenge in terms of
complexity is presented by the sedate sport of lawn bowls, because
several competitions take place simultaneously.
A second specialist application supplier, Delta Tre Informatica, is
responsible for much of the work involved in the vital local and
central results systems each of which contribute to the overall
Games Family Information Systems (GFIS) deployed on a network of
"infoterminals" to provide up-to-date information on events,
logistics and participants.
Specialist software collates results information with background
information such as athletes' previous performances, event records
and the like, statistical information such as the number of shots
by a particular player in a netball match and similar relevant
material, and feeds this into the results systems and updates the
live scoreboards in the various venues.
Inevitably the event will generate huge media interest and
Manchester 2002 expects about 5,000 journalists - ranging from
those representing print publications through to radio and TV
commentators, camera crews and the like. Although computer access
is widely available journalists want results on paper and the role
of many of the 900 IT-related volunteers (there are more than
10,000 volunteers helping in the games as a whole) is to deliver
printed sheets to the press benches. Pennell estimates that between
eight million and nine million pieces of paper will be
printed.
The BBC broadcasts the games to UK audiences and supplies feeds to
other providers, including in other countries, and part of the IT
role is to blend in the overlays which explain matters such as
rankings or show close-ups of shooting targets as the competitor
fires.
The IT infrastructure has to support all of this. Windows 2000 or
XP Server and Advanced Server are deployed behind the scenes and
Windows 2000 Professional is on the desktops. Information on staff,
volunteers, visitors and accreditations, as well as historic
sporting data, results and more, is managed through SQL Server
200l. Hardware is from Compaq/Hewlett-Packard, printers from Xerox
and much of the communications infrastructure is from BT.
Microsoft Operations Manager constantly monitors the servers and
the technology operations centre is replicated across two sites.
There are local area networks in each of the 27 locations and all
these are connected in a wide area network, with separate links to
each communications centre.
Wireless networking is not being used. "We expect a large number of
people to arrive at the games with various forms of [radio]
equipment," says Pennell, "and the risk of having interference and
cross-over effects is just too great, which is why we went for the
low-risk solution using conventional cabling."
One of the notable characteristics of the infrastructure is the
extensive use of XML, managed here through Microsoft's Biztalk 2000
Server.
Data from the local results system, the athletes' villages, the
media centre and elsewhere is passed through as XML, everything
which reaches the central results system is in XML, all the news
and related feeds to broadcasters and news agencies, such as
Reuters, is in XML and data reaches the Web sites in XML form, in
each case according to schema developed by Manchester 2002 or by
one of its technology partners.
"Six years ago, when I joined Microsoft, we wouldn't have dreamed
of getting involved in something this big," remarks Alistair Baker,
until recently responsible for Microsoft's involvement with
Manchester 2002, "but we took the decision that as both our
technology and, very importantly, our service organisation was
sufficiently mature, we should be part of it and so demonstrate our
enterprise capabilities."
For Microsoft this is a major challenge and the company appears to
be doing everything possible to make sure not only that the IT
infrastructure is fully ready in time but that it is sufficiently
resilient to cope with any problems, including malicious attempts
at breaking what will inevitably be a very high profile Web site
and IT deployment. Considerable redundancy has been built in and
specialist Microsoft support staff will be on-site 24 hours a day
for the 11 days of the games.
Pennell seems happy with the service from Microsoft. "I'd never
used it as a service provider before but it has all worked very
well for us. It has been integrated and consistent from end to end,
beginning with architectural design consultancy right from the
start, project management and additional consultancy as the project
continued and through to the essential support it is providing as
the games begin."
Technology is undoubtedly key to the success of the games, and the
indications at the start of the 10-day event are that the whole
project has been well planned and executed.
If it works as expected then no doubt Microsoft and the successors
to Manchester 2002 will be looking to take on the bigger challenge
of the next UK Olympics, whenever that may be.
Technical facts
- Public Web site expected to have about 180 million hits daily;
Microsoft IIS will manage both that and the internal intranet
- Pure Windows platform using Windows 2000 and Windows XP
Server/Advanced Server for delivery and Windows 2000 Professional
on the desktop systems; Office XP Professional used for word
processing and general administration tasks
- 120 servers, 2,000 information PCs and 600 administrative
desktop PCs, 400 printers
- The server and desktop systems are managed centrally using
Microsoft Operations Manager and Compaq Insight Manager
- Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration Server manages the
background administrative intranet and provides the portal
facilities through which designated third parties can
communicate
- Staff authorisation badges are conventional, low-tech items
simply using colour, text and photographs
- The 14 types of Compaq servers are configured with redundant
subsystems including dual power supplies and network interface
cards and mirrored Raid disc arrays and the servers are themselves
designed to operate as redundant pairs
- The database management system is SQL Server 2000 and e-mail is
handled using Microsoft Exchange 2000
- Key software installations, such as Microsoft IIS and SQL
Server 7, are replicated to warm standby systems and the technology
operations centre is replicated across two sites with separate wide
area network links from each to the individual site local area
networks.