Venyu Tackles DR for NFL New Orleans Saints and NBA Pelicans Franchises

Venyu Solutions, Inc., in BC, cloud-based virtualization, and data recovery, celebrates their partnership with the New Orleans Saints and New Orleans Pelicans.

The NFL and NBA franchises selected the company’s colocation to provide DR hosting as well as firewall protection and Metro-based Ethernet connectivity.

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. A team of dedicated IT personnel were determined to keep the franchise running by salvaging and moving the Saints’ entire network to a safe zone. Led by Jeff Huffman, director of IT, New Orleans Saints, the IT team arrived at the office the day after the hurricane hit and dismantled the entire network by flashlight – carrying all servers and PCs down dark stairwells for transport to San Antonio, TX.

“The whole thing reminded me of a MASH episode,” Huffman recalled. “There was no electricity and we had to find and dismantle 125 desktops including monitors, keyboards and mice. With the help of the US Marines, we were able to locate our desktop PCs and find 16 servers. We then had to lay them on their sides and slide them down dark stairwells-one by one.“

To prevent this scramble from occurring again, Huffman drafted Venyu. Venyu’s flexible colocation solution gives the Saints and as of 2013, the Pelicans ample space, network bandwidth and IT security they needed for BC-related services. The company’s commercial-grade data centers are designed with industry physical and network security protection, DR options and a wide range of environmental controls system redundancies. In addition to hosting their network infrastructure, the teams also took advantage of Venyu’s BC center.

“As with all enterprise organizations, IT services have become the cornerstone of sports franchise business operations,” said Scott Thompson, CEO, Venyu. “However, beyond back office applications, these franchise IT departments must also support new services such as WiFi game-day activities accessed via smartphones and tablets as well as large amounts of video from scouts and coaches. We are proud to be protecting the New Orleans Saints’ and New Orleans Pelicans’ IT assets, and are excited to see how our solutions have helped the team’s data services expand.“

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