Hidden dragon

The 2010 Winter Olympics are upon us, and organisers are hoping that heavy investment in technology will pave the way to gold and green. The faint sound of Alpine bells must mean the Winter Olympic Games are set to begin this year nestling between the city of Vancouver and Whistler mountain in the Canadian West. The whisper is, Canada may just have a surprise up its sleeve with a top secret programme funding a small army of scientists and engineers aiming for the \´greenest\´ ever Olympics. As soon as it was awarded the games, the Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC) swung into action developing infrastructure and investing in sports. Bell Canada official sponsor and telecommunications provider lay 285 km of fibre optic cable between the 135 venues, offering 15,000 simultaneous connections to the network. "An all-IP system allows us to converge data, voice, video and broadcast over one network to improve reliability. reduce costs, and easily build in redundancy." says Ward Chapin. chief information officer of VANOC. "It\´s so such simpler because there is 3s cabling, fewer switches, id no need for a PBX for voice". Bell has also built and is hosting the vancouver2010.com portal, on a custom made cloud computing infrastructure comprised of 30,000 servers jildwide.