EMC Delivers Technologies for MLBAM

HOPKINTON, Mass., April 9, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- EMC Corporation (NYSE:EMC) today announced that MLB Advanced Media, L.P. (MLBAM), 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.

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Customer Benefits:

• Increased 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%
• Improved 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.
• Better Efficiency — With intelligent storage tiering and provisioning with VMAX, storage utilization rates have increased by 65%, reducing total cost of ownership of IT assets by 50 %.

Customer Challenges and Solution:

The popularity of MLBAM's online and video streaming offerings has grown rapidly. 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 EMC Isilon scale-out storage for its live streaming and video-on-demand of all MLB games and EMC VMAX 10K enterprise storage to run its mission-critical applications, including Oracle databases for e-commerce and statistics analysis. In addition, MLBAM uses FAST VP to automatically 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 VMware 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 exponential growth.

Customer Quotes:

Joe Inzerillo, Senior Vice President, Content Technology/CTO, MLB Advanced Media

"Every now and then you run into a product that changes what's possible. Isilon is one of those major advances that enables 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."

Additional Resources:

• Hear MLB talk more about VMAX 10K
• Read the Customer Profile
• Learn more about EMC Isilon and EMC VMAX
• Connect with EMC via Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and ECN  

About EMC

EMC Corporation is a global leader in enabling businesses and service providers to transform their operations and deliver IT as a service. Fundamental to this transformation is cloud computing. Through innovative products and services, EMC accelerates the journey to cloud computing, helping IT departments to store, manage, protect and analyze their most valuable asset – information – in a more agile, trusted and cost-efficient way. Additional information about EMC can be found at www.EMC.com.

EMC, Isilon, and VMAX are registered trademarks or trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners.

SOURCE EMC Corporation