Managing Olympic Servers

The Olympics is this week – and we’ll ignore the copyright shenanigans of the Olympics – but there has been some interesting articles about the massive requirements that the Olympics requires of its IT equipment and staff.

The company providing the IT services is Atos Origin, and Magnus Alvarsson is their leader on the spot. CNET’s Ina Fried interviewed Magnus on February 8, and followed up with details of the IT infrastructure required on February 10.

There are a number of unique problems they face. One is that certain media outlets required old equipment (such as ISDN lines) to send their data back home. Another is that voice, data, and video will all traverse over the network using IP – the first time the Olympics has done this.

I always enjoy reading about other’s IT challenges and how they met them.