Unseen by US Open attendees, and millions more television viewers and online visitors, a small army of USTA and IBM staffers toil under the Arthur Ashe and Louis Armstrong stadiums. And this year, they are tasked with doing just about everything in an environmentally friendly way as part of an all-encompassing green initiative.

During my visit, Michelle Wilson, chief marketing officer, USTA listed the many ways this year's tournament is driving the green theme home. In addition to hiring environmental consultants, the USTA is investing in energy credits to offset the US Open's impact; expanding its on-site bottle recycling efforts; encouraging the use of mass transit with Metrocard giveaways (60 percent of attendees already take the subway); adding hybrids to its fleet of player transport; and has filmed PSAs that play on several of the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center's video boards and air on USA and CBS.

Technologically, the most obvious examples are the scoring and statistics operations and the heavily-virtualized USOpen.org web infrastructure. InternetNews.com's Christopher Saunders paid a behind the scenes visit to the operation's guts. Besides some pics (like the one above), he lends insight into the role of how energy-efficiency and cost-savings are shaping how sporting event employ technology.

At the heart of all this are the half-dozen IBM p6 550 servers, spread across three U.S. datacenters.

The machines use virtualized Linux partitions for Web serving using IBM HTTP Server, with AIX partitions for WebSphere Application Server -- handling some of the site's interactive features like commenting, feedback and player search) -- and WebSphere Business Integration Message Broker for real-time scores and match status updates.

The savings from all this is immediate and sizable: Energy consumption costs have dropped by 23 percent, while costs per visitor are down 38 percent -- even as the site experiences record-breaking demand.

Big Green indeed.