Many people are excited about the London Olympic Games, and for good reason. This event happens once every four years and is widely promoted by the media, especially when one knows that the competition only lasts for two weeks.  It is truly a unique moment for the athletes, coaches, spectators, and all the people who follow their country! But the Olympics could be a little more exciting for us geeks, because it has also has particular impact on the use of Big Data.

Big Data by the Numbers

NetApp, a leader in enterprise storage and data management, has released an infographic (see below) showing the sheer volume of big data is expected to be generated on a global scale by social networks, connected devices, and broadcasting networks.

There is no doubt that the world has adapted to technology, and of course to social networking. For example, did you know that a total of 200,000 hours of big data was generated while testing the IT systems and infrastructure before the Games even started? The opening ceremony alone was watched by more than one billion people, and an equal number of people are expected to visit the official Website of the 2012 summer games.

During the events, a massive 60 GB of information is expected to be generated across British telecom’s network, and an equivalent of 2000 hours of live sports media coverage will be digitally broadcasted to more than 14,400 TV and broadcast stations worldwide.

Undoubtedly, this Olympic continue to surprise us!  Your Facebook feeds have likely been filled with an average of 15TB of data each day during the games, from more than 845 million monthly active Facebook users. Twitter is not far behind. Twitter fans are expected to post more than 13,000 tweets per second during the summer games.

Despite additional capacity and coverage for the live sports being put in around Games venues, more than 8.5 billion connected devices are expected to be connected to the internet during the games.

Numbers are big, but where is the excitement?

It’s been six days since the London Olympics 2012 started but one thing is missing this year – the competitive spirit of the athletes to beat previous World Records. An interesting study by GE notes that breaking world records have significantly declined this year.

“In 1999, athletes broke 112 records in summer sports, the most is a single year. Nine years later, in 2008, they broke 94 records in summer events, the second highest count in one year. There has been a short drought since. But if history is any guide, we may be on the verge of a new bumper crop, the report says.

Then there were two matches at the Wembley Arena that figured players from attempting to lose instead of trying to win. A day later, all eight women badminton players were kicked out of the Games for deliberately trying to lose their doubles matches.