Gallery: IBM shows off the technology underpinning Wimbledon
IBM shows the predictive analytics, web and security technology that keeps the Wimbledon Tennis Championships online
IBM has given Computing access to the technology it uses to underpin the Wimbledon Tennis Championships, keeping the website online and populated with data from the players and their matches.
Andy Burns, IBM project manager for Wimbledon.com explained that the site changes its feel depending on the environment.
"Background images on the website give it a different feel. As it turns to night you see night time shots, if it rains you see cloudy shots. It gives you a sense of place. The All England Club [which runs the tennis championships] spent a lot of time rebranding the tournament physically, giving it a better sense of place, and we're doing the same thing online."
Gallery: IBM shows off the technology underpinning Wimbledon
IBM shows the predictive analytics, web and security technology that keeps the Wimbledon Tennis Championships online
A new feature of the site this year is something IBM calls the 'keys' to the match, or the stats a player must attain in the match in order to be likely to win.
"We perform analysis to generate the keys to each player. If a player achieves these keys, there's a good chance the player will win the match.
"We've analysed the last seven years of Wimbledon data, which is almost 40 million points of data. We've used data mining to understand the patterns of play, and the possible permutations.
"We know how that player has performed recently, taking local conditions into account like court temperature. Then we determine what we think the top keys of the match are. It could be to attain a certain percentage of second service return winners for example."
IBM's SPSS software is used for data mining and predictive analytics.
Gallery: IBM shows off the technology underpinning Wimbledon
IBM shows the predictive analytics, web and security technology that keeps the Wimbledon Tennis Championships online
Last year the Wimbledon website was served to over 50 million unique users over the two-week period of the Championships.
"If you look at the website, every page counts as a separate page view," said Burns.
"Last year we served over 450 million page views in total."
The site is available on Android, iPhone, and is browsable on the iPad. Burns explained that mobile is an increasingly important way for users to consume the site's content.
"Last year, over 97 per cent of all mobile traffic came from iOS. Some 28 per cent of page views last year came from mobile in total. Mobile is taking share from dotcom, and it's growing from event to event. At all our events we see mobile taking more of the share."
Gallery: IBM shows off the technology underpinning Wimbledon
IBM shows the predictive analytics, web and security technology that keeps the Wimbledon Tennis Championships online
IBM uses its own private cloud spread over three US datacentres in Raleigh, St Louis and Boulder to host the Wimbledon website.
The load balancing between the datacentres, and their performance, is monitored from the IBM technology centre at the Wimbledon site.
"The cloud is very flexible, we only need to have the infrastructure that we need to do the job, and if we need more we can provision it," said Burns.
"We have variable requirements throughout the year, and the cloud allows us to only provision what we need, allowing other applications at IBM to use those resources as they need them. At any moment I can provision a new web server by clicking on it, and the dashboard shows what's happening in the background.
"We search for a frame that has spare capacity. Then we can configure space on that frame to become the web server. It talks to infrastructure monitoring, the load balancing happens, then that becomes an active web serving capability."
Gallery: IBM shows off the technology underpinning Wimbledon
IBM shows the predictive analytics, web and security technology that keeps the Wimbledon Tennis Championships online
If the team needs to take infrastructure down for maintenance, it can move an active workload from one server to another without interrupting the service.
"We can do it literally by drag and drop using the interface," said Burns.
"We can dig into it to see what's sitting on that frame. The information on the applications comes up when you mouse-over it. You can also see the spare capacity on that box."
Johnathan F Van Houten, lead IT architect for IBM at Wimbledon, added that IBM is trying to get away from thinking about provisioning in terms of nodes, hardware and frames, and thinking about it now in terms of service.
"These are services we're moving from frame to frame. You can move an active service that's live from a frame in Raleigh, to Boulder Colorado in three minutes without interruption," said Van Houten.
The team at Wimbledon also monitors nodes out on the internet that are hitting the website in order to monitor their own response times. It monitors 30 locations around the world to ensure that globally people are getting a decent experience from the site.
"If I saw one location spiking up, we can look to see if there's a problem there – we can check the internet health report to see if that backbone is having difficulty. We can then contact someone at the local telecom or backbone provider to ask if they're having an issue.
"The internet reroutes itself eventually, but we can tell people that they have a problem. We can see if there's a problem coming from an entire geography."
Gallery: IBM shows off the technology underpinning Wimbledon
IBM shows the predictive analytics, web and security technology that keeps the Wimbledon Tennis Championships online
This screen shows live cyber attacks which are being detected and blocked.
"Yesterday got just over 60,000 attacks," said Van Houten. "We could block by IP address, but the smart guys know how to change their IP addresses easily, so we simply recognise the threat and drop it before it gets into the network.
"The signatures [which identify the type of attack] are constantly being uptaded by the X-Force team in IBM, they're constantly updating the database.
"The system recognises the low hanging fruit, attacks by script kiddies etc, and some medium and high-level threats, but it's not the only thing we do. It's about a multi-layered approach, setting up the routers properly, creating a proper set of DMZs, only allowing certain types of traffic from one zone to the next, and putting all our application servers in a safe zone – only certain protocols can go through.
"It's not just about putting an IPS out and having firewalls, it's an entire security posture."
Gallery: IBM shows off the technology underpinning Wimbledon
IBM shows the predictive analytics, web and security technology that keeps the Wimbledon Tennis Championships online
This picture shows threats that were identifed and blocked earlier this week by the IBM Wimbledon team. Half way down the list is denial of service (DoS) attacks.
"DoS doesn't always looks like regular traffic, sometimes they change the MTU size because they want to fragment your packet," said Van Houten.
"They have time-outs configured, as they want to hold the window open. We recognise that signature and are able to drop it. We had 750 DoS attacks today. These are DNS bind types, the attackers are trying to deny access to our servers or bind them."
Gallery: IBM shows off the technology underpinning Wimbledon
IBM shows the predictive analytics, web and security technology that keeps the Wimbledon Tennis Championships online
IBM maintains a huge repository of statistics on current and past games and players, which is made available to press and broadcasters on site.
"This system is provided to broadcasters and press on site. You see more detail through this system than through the website – the point being the championship's organisers are trying to reward press for actually attending the event," said Bill Jinks, technical adviser for IBM at Wimbledon.
"The on-court systems shows you exactly what's going on on court at any one time."
Gallery: IBM shows off the technology underpinning Wimbledon
IBM shows the predictive analytics, web and security technology that keeps the Wimbledon Tennis Championships online
Stats are also kept from previous tournaments, which can be mined alongside more up-to-date data.
This screen shows the draw from the 1922 Wimbledon Championships, the first time the tennis came to the current site.