EMC Delivers Isilon and Vmax to MLBAM

EMC Corporation announced that MLBAM, L.P., the interactive media and internet
company of Major League Baseball, has implemented EMC technologies to support
live video streaming and e-commerce for baseball fans around the world.

With the performance and reliability advantages of EMC technologies, MLBAM has
improved the quality of video streaming and online experiences for fans looking
to capture their favorite MLB baseball teams in action.

Customer Benefits:

• 
  Performance: EMC Isilon’s built-in metadata acceleration has increased performance of
  MLBAM’s video streaming by 50%, and EMC VMAX 10K with FAST VP has helped
  increase performance of Oracle-based website applications by 67%
• Availability: System
  downtime has been reduced by 95% since implementing Isilon, enabling MLBAM to
  deliver live video streaming.
• Simplified Management: Since
  consolidating its IT infrastructure with a centralized management console from
  Isilon, MLBAM has reduced storage administration time from 10 to two hours
  weekly.
• Efficiency: With intelligent
  storage tiering and provisioning with VMAX, storage utilization rates have
  increased by 65%, reducing TCO of IT assets by 50 %.

Customer Challenges and Solution:
The popularity of
MLBAM’s online and video streaming offerings has grown. MLBAM captured,
encoded and distributed nearly 18,000 live video events, including up to 60
live streams of baseball games every day during a seven to 12 hour period.

As streaming activity
and transaction volumes have surged, MLBAM’s prior storage and file systems
were no longer providing adequate performance and reliability. In addition, the
prior infrastructure was based on disparate systems and complex configurations,
requiring IT staff to spend time and resources on day-to-day administration and
troubleshooting.

After conducting a
proof of concept, MLBAM selected Isilon scale-out storage for its live
streaming and video-on-demand of all MLB games and VMAX 10K enterprise
storage to run its applications, including Oracle
databases for e-commerce and statistics analysis. In addition, MLBAM uses FAST
VP to optimize performance in a tiered environment and
Symmetrix Virtual Provisioning to provide applications with more capacity than
is physically allocated from a shared pool. MLBAM also leverages vSphere for
its virtualized environment.

With improved
performance, reliability and scalability, EMC technologies are helping MLBAM
provide baseball fans around the world with high-quality video and online
experiences while leveraging infrastructure scalability to support
growth.

Joe Inzerillo, SVP,
Content Technology/CTO, MLBAM, said: "Every now and then you run into a product that changes what’s possible.
Isilon is one of those major advances that enable us to innovate faster and
better.

"Live streaming is like turning on a fire
hose. With Isilon, metadata acceleration is built in rather than sequestered
separately from the storage like our previous infrastructure. Isilon can easily
keep up with the intensity and ferocity of our loads. In fact, we’ve seen write
performance improve by 50% while read performance has increased by 67% since
Isilon came online.

"A big part of that is being able to
consolidate file systems on one volume. Any time you have fewer moving parts,
it generally yields better stability.

"All indicators are moving toward greater
demand being placed on our storage. We expect to surpass 20,000 live stream
events in 2013 alone and continue to add new services, such as features that
help fans with vision and hearing impairments more fully enjoy our live
content. The fact that Isilon lets us add capacity while the car is running is
extremely valuable."