The offices of the Johannesburg World Summit Company (Jowsco), which is responsible for much of the logistics around the World Summit on Sustainable Development, look like they have withstood a mild hurricane. Paper, equipment and cabling are strewn everywhere between a haphazard layout of desks and chairs, and the offices were even without lights during part of yesterday.
Yet the superficial confusion at what also serves as the central administration point for the summit IT network simply masks the efficiency with which the technology is clicking along, says the project manager in charge of more than R30 million worth of equipment.
"The problems that we have are minor, mostly users that just need a little help," says project manager Kirsten Leemans, an employee of HP which is sponsoring most of the IT solution.
Organisers say the summit is the third-largest event in the world this year, after the Winter Olympics and the Soccer World Cup, and that means registration of the thousands of participants was the biggest potential nightmare, says Leemans.
"There was one thing that had to work absolutely perfectly and it was the accreditation," says Leemans. With most of the participants registered by Monday afternoon, that crisis had passed with engineers patting themselves on the back with each registration averaging less than six minutes.
Now, bar small administrative tasks and changes, they wait for something to go wrong.
The power outage at the Jowsco offices presented little problem thanks to three generators at the site. The site also serves as a third backup to the main Sandton Convention Centre and Nasrec exhibition grounds, across which data is replicated in near real-time.
Replacements for many of the 2 300 PCs and 128 servers as well as the many printers and cameras in use around 39 sites are stored at Jowsco, ready to be rolled out in hours in the event of a failure. "You have never seen redundancy like this," says Leemans.
To date, however, the main problems have been the theft of four PCs from Nasrec and traditional administration bugbears such as users forgetting passwords. Such issues are resolved though a dedicated call centre, by one of 15 roving engineers or a group of volunteers at various venues tasked with solving printer jams and similar less technical problems.
The trick, Leemans says, is simplicity. "We have done nothing sexy, nothing cutting-edge, nothing fancy. We went for simple and efficient."
The SchlumbergerSema applications software, for instance, is run on servers using Windows NT 4, an operating system replaced some time ago by Windows 2000.
Barring disasters, the second big test of the system and processes will come when the summit closes and the IT team has less than three days to remove all equipment from the various sites. The plan is to remove all the equipment as quickly as possible and to reassemble the network in a warehouse for a final check. The various machines will then be cleaned up and either sold to the public or donated to community projects, particularly in the Limpopo province.
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