USTA nets server savings

Computerworld - FLUSHING MEADOWS, N.Y. -- Andy Roddick's 152-mph serve wasn't the only power on display last night at the U.S. Open.
IBM, which runs computer operations for the United States Tennis Association, recently consolidated the Internet scoring, staging and Web publishing applications for the U.S. Open from three IBM xSeries servers onto a single eServer i5 520 machine running Linux.
The server consolidation has helped IBM reduce the USTA's cost per end user by 40% compared with last year, thanks to reduced disk requirements and more efficient workload processing, because the iSeries machine can automatically move workload from one server partition to another, said John Kent, an IBM project manager.
The USOpen.org Web site itself is supported by another iSeries machine at an alternate IBM data center. And Web publishing data is sent to two other IBM data centers for workload provisioning and redundancy, said Kent.
When a point is made during a match, the chair umpire uses an IBM-branded Palm PDA to enter the score. The data is then fed into an IBM DB2 Universal Database running Linux. A group of 30 USTA writers, editors, producers and audio/video engineers approve and publish the content for the U.S. Open Web site using a Linux-based eServer X365 system running WebSphere Portal content publisher.
A staging server runs in another Linux partition and combines content from the Internet scoring system and the content publisher to create the USOpen.org Web pages.
The on-demand, hosted computing model from IBM has helped the tennis association handle wide swings in processing demands. "This [event] is like our Super Bowl," said Ezra Kucharz, managing director of media for the USTA, which is based in White Plains, N.Y. "Our information needs here [at the U.S. Open] are 50 times what they are the other 50 weeks of the year, so it doesn't make sense for us to invest in that kind of infrastructure on an annual basis."
Haverty Furniture Cos. is another IBM customer that has benefited from iSeries server consolidation. The Atlanta-based company, which has about 100 retail outlets in the Southeast U.S., collapsed nine IBM AS/400s down to three iSeries machines in January to support its core applications, including points-of-sale operations, customer service and home deliveries.
J. Edward Clary, Haverty's CIO, declined to quantify the cost savings from the server consolidation. But he did say that the effort has freed up some of the company's 50 IT staffers to help support the company's Domino, Linux and WebSphere platforms.
The server consolidation, said Clary, "has allowed us toredistribute staff to attack problems in a nonlinear fashion."