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As an Olympic Worldwide Partner, Acer is providing the IT infrastructure for the London Olympics. Matt Grainger was lucky enough to get a sneak peek at what they’re doing…
Perhaps one of the lesser known facts about Acer is that, as well as being a manufacturer of PC hardware, the vendor is also a Worldwide Partner of the International Olympic Committee, responsible for supplying the games with IT equipment.
Having already had experience providing infrastructure for the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, the company has spent the last year in preparation for the 2012 Olympic Games in London, and considering that the summer games are around three times the size of the winter games, it’s been time well spent.
The company is providing 11,500 desktop PCs, 2,000 touchscreen monitors, 1,100 laptops, 900 servers and 350 technicians for the upcoming games and, in it’s own words, has completed around 98 per cent of its tasks for the event.
The key issue here is stability, so the company is providing thousands of Veriton L670G mini-desktop PCs.
Although they are around three years old in design terms, the devices have proven themselves as a stable platform in the Vancouver Olympics. Meanwhile each server has multiple redundancies; two servers act as primary and backup, while a third ‘cold’ server is always on standby. The same practice has been extended to networking equipment and power supply.
In addition to hardware stability, there is a huge amount of software testing being done to ensure that the games can run smoothly. Each event category requires a different software set, reflecting the diversity of scoring systems, and each commentator must be able to access this data quickly and efficiently.
If the London games follow the example of the Vancouver games, then once the dust has cleared from the games, the huge amount of technology will be shipped out in to public bodies around the country including libraries, schools and councils.
