For a company like Fox Sports, system downtime doesn’t just disrupt business operations: it can potentially lead to major loss of customers, revenues, and even contracts with partners. Fox Sports is one of Asia’s leading sports broadcasters, and in 2012 the Australian company saw an opportunity to move to a private cloud while building its new production studio.
The transition to the cloud, however, had an extremely small window of time: less than six months if it was to support the new studio. And both the migration and new solution would have to ensure world-class levels of uptime in order for Fox Sports’ live sports broadcasts to meet consumer expectations.
Fox Sports IT team realised it was in no position to build its own cloud solution from scratch, both from a time and skills perspective. Instead, the team designed the cloud around a VCE Vblock system – one of the first to be deployed in the Asia-Pacific region. The Vblock orchestrates all of the private cloud’s operations, including
- 20km of fibre optic connections
- More than 15 petabytes of storage
- Internal data traffic of up to 50 terabytes a day
Video production, streaming, and broadcasting incur huge demands on bandwidth, yet Fox Sports’ private cloud saw support calls drop by 75 percent in its first year of operation, thanks to the negligible downtime that the Vblock delivers. Perhaps most crucially, VCE manages and supports all technical aspects of the Vblock’s operation, including minimising both unforeseen and planned outages. That leaves Fox Sports’ 40-person IT team to focus on higher priorities like ramping up HD channels, online streaming, and other technology platforms for even greater regional growth.
Watch how Fox Sports embraced converged infrastructure here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gp3cczBkx0
Read more about Fox Sports’ use of Vblocks on ITWire and CIO Australia.
