Some of the massive IT infrastructure set up for World Youth Day is expected to be redistributed to Catholic schools. Techworld reports now that WYD is over, much of the IT equipment used is sitting in warehouses and at the WYD head office, waiting to be inventoried and reconfigured.
IT&T project manager for WYD, Josh Lemon told Techworld that WYD organisers are still working through the details of what will happen to it all, with redistribution to Australian Catholic schools likely.
"The plan was for a lot of it to go back into Catholic schools and be redeployed there, but in terms of how far and wide that will spread we're still to be given direction on that. At the moment we're still in the middle of cleaning everything up," he said.
Lemon, and the IT manager for the Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney, Matt Browning, were behind the infrastructure that made WYD 2008 the most technologically advanced ever.
WYD's network utilised a Telstra managed WAN infrastructure to provide access to the internal network of WYD's Sydney headquarters from two external WYD offices and from most event sites including Hyde Park, the Domain, Barangaroo and Randwick.
"We built a Citrix farm on HP blade equipment. Basically all the backend infrastructure was stored in our head office, email, file systems, document management etc, and accessed via a Citrix client. That allowed us to drop a computer anywhere, and any staff member from any site could log on at any site," Browning said.
Manning each WYD site with IT staff would have been too cost prohibitive, so the Citrix model allowed everything from accreditation to incident handling to be managed and supported remotely, with IT staff required only at the major sites.
The two largest event sites, Barangaroo and Randwick boasted a meshed 10 Gigabit backbone with roughly eight nodes on both sites.
"From one node there would be three 10 Gigabit fibres to three other nodes, so if we ever lost a connection the network would continue to run," Lemon said.
Originally there was no intention to run so much bandwidth around the two major event sites, but as more and more network needs cropped up HP suggested to WYD's IT staff that they run all network needs on the one 10 Gigabit backbone.
"I think that was the handiest thing we had across the sites," Lemon said.
Lemon said the network held up without any hitches during WYD events, and only came close to around 50 percent capacity. Running so many different contractors and companies over the same network had never been done before at any WYD, nor at such a large scale.
The network also boasted significant redundancy levels during the week long series of events, running across diverse fibres to different exchanges, in case Telstra suffered an exchange outage or the fibre link was severed somewhere during crucial events such as the Pope's Mass.
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