Wimbledon expects ace service from Linux

The intranet for this year's Wimbledon Tennis Championships, which start next Monday, is based on a Linux-based IT infrastructure for the first time.

After a successful Linux pilot last year the All England Lawn Tennis Club converted its intranet from IBM's AIX Unix flavour. Linux is also used for the official website, which last year the website received 27 million hits, up 75 per cent on the year before.

"We are not deploying Linux just for the sake of it," Mark McMurrugh, IBM's Wimbledon project director, told vnunet.com. "We considered the advantages and disadvantages of each system and decided it was appropriate to switch [the intranet]."

The intranet, which now uses two IBM xSeries Intel servers, contains scores and statistics on matches and is owned by the All England Lawn Tennis Club.

For this year's championships 100 client laptops and desktops and 60 PDAs will be connected. They are deployed in the players' lounge, the press centre, and at access points around the ground.

IBM will operate the Wimbledon website, using its Tivoli ThinkDynamic Orchestrator on-demand software to allocate computing power from servers, mostly xSeries, around the world, as site traffic fluctuates.

New in 2004 is a secure Wi-Fi local area network covering all of Wimbledon. IBM will also pilot streaming live action to wireless devices for the first time, while a 'Pocket Wimbledon' version of the website display is optimised for PDA display over GPRS.

The 2004 website, www.wimbledon.org, has been live since 7 June. The championships run from Monday 21 June to Sunday 4 July.