Edmonton Eskimo Football Club Selected Scale Computing HC3

Scale Computing, Inc., in hyperconverged solutions for mid-sized companies, announced that the Edmonton Eskimos, 14-time Canadian Grey Cup champions, are using Scale Computing HC3 to maintain a network of CCTV cameras, antivirus and system monitoring, spread across two sites.

The Edmonton Eskimo Football Club is considered one of the most successful teams in Canadian Football League history. Established in 1949 in Edmonton, Alberta, the team has won the Grey Cup 14 times, most recently in 2015. Similar to all football teams, the Eskimos have 90% of its income occur during only 10-11 business days a year, thus there is no room for error and high demand for maximum uptime and reliability.

Before migrating to Scale, the community-owned football club had inflexible, unreliable hardware and lacked the raw storage necessary for its CCTV cameras. The Club also had exponential growth of multimedia, especially as they tend to create a high volume of videos and pictures. Another growing challenge for their IT infrastructure was managing 50/50, the biggest raffle lottery in North America.

“Our CCTV system has expanded from occasional use to covering our merchandise store 24 hours a day, seven days a week, which requires a significant increase in storage for our IP security system,” said Darren Woolston, IT manager, Edmonton Eskimos. “It wasn’t just the short term pain points that brought us to Scale, it was the flexibility for future growth. Anything the business throws at us, with Scale Computing, we have a platform to either immediately have capacity for or build upon in the future.“

The Edmonton Eskimos implemented HC3 platform, complete with flash storage, allowing the organization to serve its existing workloads and storage requirements with ease, and also to expand and add additional workloads as they come. Soon, it will be adding an additional two to four VMs to put its mission-critical concession systems on its Scale cluster. Management of the infrastructure is as simple for one server as it is a dozen, and extending that infrastructure is as easy as adding additional nodes, with Scale’s support staff on demand.

“With Scale Computing HC3, customers like the Edmonton Eskimos can leverage the power of redundant and reliable servers backed by the technical expertise of Scale’s support team available on demand,” said Jeff Ready, CEO and co-founder, Scale Computing. “With this peace of mind, the Club can focus its resources on running one of the most successful teams in the CFL, while Scale Computing helps power and scale its infrastructure on the backend.“