Virtual beers and pies

According to Gifford, the perception of virtualisation technology 18 months ago may have proven to be an insurmountable obstacle.

Indeed, during the first stages of the project the software vendor providing the transaction application to ANZ, Infogenesis, was apprehensive about using a virtualised system. Yet after extensive testing and discussions they agreed.

"It was new for them, but they came to the party pretty quickly," Gifford said. "Once everything was sorted and they saw it all work and what it can actually do they were sold. We're now virtualising every server they have out there."

The Future

As part of their ongoing relationship with IMC, the management at ANZ Stadium have taken a hosting package to monitor and mitigate possible outages and downtime. The service package includes 24/7 monitoring of system resources and the option of email, SMS and paging alerts if a server health threshold is breached.

"Aside from the physical hardware cost, ANZ Stadium also had to house and maintain its physical servers," ANZ Stadium manager information technology and administration, David Fletcher, said. "VMware virtualisation reduces the associated space and administration costs, as well as facilitating more efficient disaster recovery."

And as recent big events like the NSW versus Queensland State of Origin rugby league game went off without a hospitality hitch the system has begun to prove its worth.

"That was probably the highest volume event and the service killed it," Gifford said.

But while we now buy beer and pies during breaks in the game from a virtualised hospitality system, thankfully the sports are still operating on bone crunching reality.