Case Study - Indians Summon Help from IT

Source: AFCOM's Data Center Management Magazine

Author: Drew Robb

Last season, the Cleveland Indians of Major League Baseball (MLB) traded the man who won the Cy Young (best pitcher) Award in 2008. That was followed by an awful season, with the Indians failing to make the playoffs for a second straight year. The manager lost his job as a result.

Despite harrowing times on the field, the Indians had a virtual perfect season in their IT department. An upgrade to its storage and backup systems may even help turn around the fortunes of the team.

The Indians have deployed CommVault Simpana software, a NetApp FAS3050 array (with up to 24 TB of capacity), an Overland NEO 4000 tape library and an Overland REO 9000 disk Virtual Tape Library (VTL) to manage the team's state-of-the-art video system.

The purpose of all this is not just to have a fancy data center to show off to visiting fans. The idea is to store every single game played during an MLB season, and that adds up to mind-boggling numbers. After all, each team participates in 162 games per year, lasting an average of three hours per match. During the course of the season, the Indians store nearly 2,600 games played.

The purpose of storing every minute played is to assist in scouting opponents and players prior to playing them in order to gain an edge. It is also used for training. No more rummaging through a pile of video cassettes and then fast forwarding through the tape to find the relevant action. The new machines can retrieve video clips nearly 15 times faster than previous systems allowed. As a side bonus, the storage backup window has been reduced.

"As a result of the new systems, the Cleveland Indians were able to cut their backup window in half and file recovery went from 75 minutes to five minutes to retrieve a video clip," says Mike Marchi, vice president of product and segment marketing at CommVault Systems, Inc., in Oceanport, N.J.

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