As customers modernize their data centers, they are increasingly adopting an all-flash strategy. Flash enables them to be fast, agile and efficient. It has become affordable too – flash is finally cheaper than the fastest spinning media, 15K RPM disks. 2016 is the Year of All Flash (YOAF). In these series of posts, I am going to chronicle many of our customers journey to the all-flash era.
I would love to start with my beloved Red Sox. Living in the Boston area for 20+ years, I am an ardent fan; so are other fourteen million New Englanders. In the past decade, The Boston Red Sox have won three World Series and is a perennial contender. What is their secret?
Professional sports is like any business where disruption is happening primarily driven by technology. It comes to play in all the four areas of the The Boston Red Sox business environment. They really have to have exceptional systems and analytics for Baseball Operations for the team to be competitive. Front office environment needs to ensure that they are running an efficient business. Understanding the fans and creating a great digital experience in the ballpark complementing the game is another critical element. Finally, having an exceptional IT operational environment allows them to support all these things ensuring The Boston Red Sox are being the best as they can be as an organization and as a sports franchise.
When time came for The Boston Red Sox to do a technology refresh, they partnered with Dell and chose the XtremIO all-flash array as their core storage infrastructure. Fast, secure and reliable data access is very important to them. XtremIO allows The Boston Red Sox to have those capabilities and helps them take it to the next level. Performance is critical: running the analytics to make operational and player personnel decisions, understanding – sometimes in real time— the fan behavior etc. are part and parcel of The Boston Red Sox staff. Knowing that they have the reliability and speed of XtremIO coupled with its administrative ease of use give them comfort that they are well prepared for the future. With XtremIO, The Boston Red Sox for the first time have the real high degree of confidence that they have a platform really exceeding their expectations. They will never have to worry again that performance will be the bottleneck.
The Boston Red Sox have seen four business benefits with XtremIO: increased application performance, reduction in storage capacity needs through deduplication, significantly lowered total cost of ownership (TCO) for the storage environment, and lastly a piece of mind knowing that XtremIO can scale with minimum burden on their IT staff as their business continues to grow.
The most important part of their Dell relationship is people that have driven the partnership. As Club President Sam Kennedy puts it, “When I think of Dell, I think of the great people we have worked with over the years who made sure that the Red Sox needs are being made. No company has been more important than Dell in preservation and protection of Fenway, helping us strategically in the business side as well as in the baseball side through all the information that we are able to gather and store. Our goal is to bring more World Series Championships to Boston and New England, and we look forward to Dell helping us get there.”
Watch the video here: http://www.emc.com/video-collateral/demos/microsites/mediaplayer-video/boston-red-sox-dell-emc-xtremio.htm
Click here for more details around XtremIO’s impact in the success The Boston Red Sox are enjoying!
