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Wimbledon moves from AIX to Linux

Published: 18 Jun 2004 13:45 BST

The Wimbledon tennis championship is moving away from a network of servers running on AIX, IBM's version of Unix, to the use of Linux and Web caching technology.

Andrew Burns, producer of the official Wimbledon Web site, said they have "managed to move away from throwing more hardware at the problem" to a more cost-effective solution using Web caching technology running on Linux.

A few years ago Wimbledon had hundreds of servers to cope with the large volumes of Web traffic seen at peak times, according to Burns. This was not only expensive in terms of hardware costs, but also caused problems when putting new content changes across all the servers, said Burns. The cache server, an IBM eServer xSeries, running on Linux will now deal with 90 percent of Web traffic.