Website for the ongoing 2012 French Open tennis tournament, also called Roland-Garros, was expected to see about 100 times more user activity then it did before the tournament, and the organizers chose IBM’s private-cloud technology as a platform to scale capacity.

The IBM SmartCloud infrastructure hosting the site consists of a “fleet of servers” dispersed across three locations. The infrastructure is virtualized and acts as one system, IBM said.

Alex Loth, CIO for the tennis event, said the organization took the fans’ experience very seriously. “The private cloud provides and analyzes the spikes of data during Roland-Garros to anyone in the world at any time without any excess demand affecting its quality or availability,” he said.

“This means fans can expect real-time access to more dynamic, content-rich matches even during the busiest periods of the competition.”

The French Open website had more than 330m page views during the 2011 tournament by 11.2m unique visitors – a 21% spike from 2010. An even higher spike was expected during over the duration of this year’s tournament, which goes from 22 May through 10 June.

In addition to providing the infrastructure capacity, IBM is supplying the website with analytics capabilities, giving users detailed data about players and matches in real time.

The announcement continues IBM’s tradition of supporting high-profile tennis events around the world, including providing technology services for Wimbledon since 1990. The company has also provided technology for the US Open and the Australian Open.