From long before the gun goes off early on the morning of 16 June, until well after the last stragglers have made it into Pietermaritzburg, Dell solutions will be hard at work.
Last month, the Systems division of the Mr Price Group and Dell SA announced they would partner to deliver the network and hardware infrastructure for this year`s Comrades.
Dell has supplied 70 GX50 OptiPlex desktops and 10 Precision 530 workstations to be used during the Comrades Expo and at the race finish. Dell is also providing four 6450 PowerEdge servers to be used as Web and database servers. These databases hold complete running histories on each Comrades participant.
According to Trenton Potgieter, senior consultant at Dell SA, the company has adopted a three-tier architecture for the Web and database servers in accordance with Dell`s Best Practice model for e-business.
"Even though the Comrades Web site is not technically an e-commerce site, we used our Best Practice model to ensure that the system will have the best response times and reliability possible on the day," he says. "Up to one million hits are expected on the Comrades Web site during the event. They will be received by a web services tier connected to a storage and database tier. This will be managed by a load-balancing tier that manages loads efficiently across the installations."
In Dell`s e-business model, the first tier consists of server appliances designed to manage the most frequently hit pages of a Web site. This tier includes cache servers typically deployed in reverse proxy mode, load-balancing servers, and Web-hosting servers. The amount of storage required in these servers depends on the size and nature of the site`s content.
Application servers comprise the second tier of this architecture. The servers in this tier store the business logic, including e-commerce applications such as online transaction processing. Full redundancy of operating systems and applications ensures high availability in case of server failure.
The third tier, which contains the database servers and associated storage subsystems, is where the critical demand for highly available storage occurs. The database servers will be supplying course information, complete statistics of each participant and a history of the event - all in real-time. In a commercial environment, this information is the lifeblood of an e-business - and will be equally critical to the success of the systems deployed at the Comrades. Its security and high data availability will be of the utmost importance.
"Dell technical experts will also be on site during the day to manage the running of the systems," adds Potgieter.
Dell hardware is also behind the ChampionChip timing system. This system allows for an accurate record of not only finish times, but also runners` split times taken at various points during the event. Each runner will have an electronic chip tied to his shoe, which is monitored by ChampionChip reader mats placed at various points on the route as well as at the finish. This enables the system to record the progress of each athlete and prevent cheating.
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