WAN, VoIP score goal for World Cup

By Andrew R. Hickey, News Writer 12 Jul 2006 | SearchNetworking.com

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Within hours of Italy's taking home the coveted FIFA World Cup championship Sunday after a cut-throat victory over France -- a tight match decided by penalty shots in overtime -- the remnants of a network the size of a European country began coming down.

Unbeknownst to the revelers, soccer fanatics and casual fans watching in pubs, stadiums and town meeting spots, it was the network that drove the 2006 World Cup.

Behind the scenes, the World Cup IT staff were charged with keeping everyone and everything connected. From players and referees to volunteers and journalists, the monstrous network tied it all together.

Throughout the international tournament's month-long run, nothing was more taxing on the network than the moments before and after a match, or when the announcers shouted "Gooaall," to tell the world their favorite squad was one point closer to victory.

At that instant, the network -- with a footprint taking up pretty much the whole of Germany -- would explode. Journalists hammered out stories, spectators fired off joyful or dismayed emails, and organizers updated statistics reports. Needless to say, a darned efficient network was needed to keep the world's biggest sporting event connected.

According to Doug Gardner, the Avaya FIFA program IT director, the network, at its peak, had to support 30,000 devices and 45,000 network connections at 70 locations from Frankfurt to Munich, including all 12 stadiums, airports and hotels. Think of it as a humongous company with 70 branch offices at every edge of Germany.

At its highest capacity, the network passed more than six terabytes of information.

Gardner said the network had been in planning since October 2003. Last year, they did a practice event at five of the 12 World Cup stadiums. The entire network was built in a lab environment between December and March, then tested and programmed to make sure everything would go smoothly. During the tournament, the IT staff that kept the network running was a whopping 260 full-timers.

Gardner frequently repeated the key to erecting such an immense network: "Planning, planning, planning."

Gardner casually brushed off the complexity, however, saying the network is simply data connectivity and IP telephony on a gargantuan scale. Yes, the staff struggled at first with some of the different protocols; otherwise, it was a nearly flawless affair.

The network design was based on similar traffic patterns from the 2002 FIFA World Cup, Gardner said. They planned for the big spikes of traffic just before the event, before and after each game, at half time, and every time a goal was scored.

Avaya Global Services operated the FIFA IT Command Center in Munich and the Avaya Network Operations Center in Coppell, Texas. There, crews had to guarantee optimal functionality, maximum uptime and no security breaches.

"FIFA is not a real risk-taker," Gardner said. "FIFA is very concerned about the security of the network."

Nearly everyone used the network -- journalists, stadium officials, referees, players, coaches and volunteers.

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The network was built with Avaya's Enterprise Service Platform, a service delivery platform that provides remote network management services that monitor the relationship between VoIP and data applications, along with their shared physical network infrastructure, to detect and sometimes automatically resolve performance problems at source, before any impact.

The network also used the Secure Intelligent Gateway (SIG), which provided secure access and visibility into devices across the converged network. The SIG received information from the devices for continual, real-time analysis and enforced preset network security policies.

Gardner wouldn't specify what the specific network security policies were, but he said that they essentially used intrusion prevention for 24/7 monitoring and also had to "make sure there was no unauthorized access."

Bryan Jefferson, senior technical director for Avaya's FIFA World Cup Program, said the IT staff also used the Converged Network Analyzer (CNA) to focus on end-to-end performance of applications -- FIFA's accreditation and ticketing applications, for example -- as they moved across the networks. Jefferson said CNA measured all available paths over the IP WAN and determined whether a better path existed to meet the needs of a specific application. If the application indicated a slow-down, analysis could determine whether re-routing the traffic could reduce congestion or whether a virus or other problem was affecting performance. As a result, he said, end users rarely experienced delays, outages or data loss.

Jefferson said the analyzer was linked to a sophisticated alerting system that could sound an alarm within 30 milliseconds of a problem so it could be addressed before users saw any effect.

That, he said, was a change from past events, where running real-time applications over a converged network could create management headaches.

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