![]() “We had multiple systems, multiple vendors, different dashboards - things were just terribly inefficient,” Fulmer says. Like the Dodgers to the south, the Warriors also struggled with a poorly planned data center infrastructure. ![]() 1 thing on my mind: Is the Wi-Fi going to work tonight? It just never kept up with demand.” We would drive to the arena, and that would be the No. “Our Wi-Fi was never planned or built to meet the demand of 20,000 fans who all had their own devices. “We always struggled with bandwidth,” recalls Brian Fulmer, senior director of IT. When the NBA’s Golden State Warriors played in Oakland, Calif., the team didn’t have control of the IT infrastructure in its arena. Running a Full-Court Press With a Modern Data Center “As we start seeing fans arrive at any particular location, we’re able to make proactive changes to ease some of the congestion,” Esquibel says. This not only improves the fan experience, but also potentially increases revenue by capturing sales that might be lost if fans decide to return to their seats instead of waiting in long concession lines. Officials monitor cameras and analytics from a centralized command post, and they use the data to redeploy resources like security, ushers and portable concessions stands to where they’re needed most. We got those down to less than 30 minutes after the upgrade, and we’re able to make decisions a lot more quickly based on the information that we’re seeing.” “We use statistical models when we put on an event to better understand our data, and previously those jobs would sometimes take six hours to process. The organization was able to shrink 40 nodes down to six, and retail transaction times improved “exponentially,” Esquibel says. The team also installed Cisco Meraki smart cameras and wireless access points throughout Dodger Stadium.Īll digital systems within the stadium, including ticketing, point-of-sale systems and digital media streaming, now run on the infrastructure, which Esquibel says has dramatically improved application performance while also shrinking the physical footprint of the team’s on-premises infrastructure. The Dodgers implemented Cisco HyperFlex hyperconverged infrastructure with Intel Xeon Scalable processors and Intel Optane solid-state drives in the team’s data center. “A lot of CIOs and chief data officers are thinking, what are the key initiatives, what are the goals of the corporate strategy? There is a much stronger connection now between the data center and business objectives.” Swing for the Fences With a Hyperconverged Infrastructure “It’s not just an IT strategy anymore,” Goetz says. And for organizations that have special needs - including those that host live events, during which large numbers of people strain network resources - a modern, physical data center offers certain advantages. Increasingly, the data center is seen as a business driver, not just a cost center, says Michele Goetz, a vice president and principal analyst with Forrester. “Our business is very cyclical, with a lot of ebbs and flows, and we wanted to have some sense of what our operating expenses would be.”Īlthough the public cloud has dominated IT infrastructure discussions in recent years, some organizations have found that a modernized data center, on their premises, is the best way to meet their needs for performance, availability and reliability. The organization initially looked at shifting its entire infrastructure into a public cloud environment, but vendors’ proposals didn’t align with the club’s needs from a cost perspective, Esquibel says. That “something” ended up taking the form of a major data center modernization effort. My team was just keeping its head above water.” But like most sports teams, we have very limited resources when it comes to personnel. ![]() Our business was complaining about transaction speeds on certain applications. Part of the challenge was maintaining those various pieces of hardware and just thinking about patch management and updates. ![]() “We had a lot of server sprawl - a lot of individual servers from different manufacturers. “There were a number of problems,” says Ralph Esquibel, senior vice president of IT for the MLB team. In 2019, the Los Angeles Dodgers found themselves in a squeeze play when it came to the organization’s data center.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |