Vision Solutions has signed a new agreement with The All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC) to supply its high availability (HA) solution MIMIX for the club’s business continuity needs. Providing critical backup during the Wimbledon tennis championship, the software runs across two System i model 520 machines.

MIMIX has been implemented by AELTC for additional emergency switch-over and back-up for its ticket management system, ballot scanning, debentures and Infor finance system in the event of an emergency.

Vision Solutions’ business partner REAL Solutions brokered the new deal as previously MIMIX was leased by the AELTC. Prior to the start of Wimbledon every year, REAL provides an annual MIMIX health check ensuring that in the event of an emergency, switch-over works smoothly and efficiently at the push of a button. It is understood REAL has been supporting Wimbledon with its IT facilities for some 11 years.

For most of the year, the HA and continuous operations of the 520 systems are not serious issues for AELTC. Normally, losing access to data and applications for even a day would not seriously impact operations. However, during Wimbledon and the period leading up to it, a loss of access to the ticketing system would be a disaster.

In addition to managing ticket sales, the club’s 520s also process tickets at the event. Both stadium and grounds tickets are bar-coded for tracking purposes. If a purchaser loses their ticket, the system can issue a duplicate. Duplicate tickets then take priority over the originals in the event of a seating dispute. The ticketing system also helps to maximise revenue and generate contributions for charities at the same time. People who leave before the end of the day’s events are asked to turn in their stadium tickets. The bar-coding and scanning system allows the club to resell these tickets, thereby keeping match attendance high, with the additional funds going to charity. 

During the tournament, MIMIX maintains a real-time replica of AELTC’s production database on the backup system. The backup system is then ready to take over operations immediately, should the need arise. If the primary system fails for any reason, MIMIX will detect the problem and automatically initiate a failover to the backup system. In such an event, downtime would be minimal. Depending on the nature of the problem, users may not even be aware that anything went wrong.

Wimbledon adopted MIMIX primarily as a HA solution. However, it found the solution also improved performance at no additional cost. Because MIMIX maintains a real-time replica of Wimbledon’s data, the ticket-office manager can run up-to-the-minute reports on the backup 520, rather than on the production system.

Of course, that’s not the only System i connection to this year’s rain swept Wimbledon. IBM has been the technical partner for the four Grand Slam tennis tournaments for over 15 years. Each year, Big Blue takes its trusty midrange servers to the U.S. Open, the French Open, Wimbledon, and the Australian Open to run the tournaments’ scoring, publishing, and web-staging environments.

--Frank Booty, industry reporter.