The Cloud Takes on Baseball with the Tampa Bay Rays

This week we are going to look at how a Major League Baseball team, the Tampa Bay Rays, uses a private cloud and plenty of virtual muscle to get it through one of the longest seasons in professional sports. What started as a need to solve a problem (IT was told they needed to bring down their electricity costs and they were running out of space at their on-site data center) grew to be a game changer that in the end revolutionized their approach to team IT support. In 2007 the operations department told the Director of IT Juan Ramirez that the main data center in Saint Petersburg, Florida was consuming too much electricity and Ramirez knew that they were running out of room. They needed to find a way to expand to a new data center that would last the organization at least 5-10 years, use less electricity and they couldn’t ask for more space. That was when they decided to go virtual. The original goal was to put 50% of the operation onto a private cloud. They began with four hosts and soon found that they only needed half the physical space they were using in Saint Petersburg and could expand when needed until today they are on ten hosts with 95% of the IT operations in the cloud. They needed to support 300 users that cover 162 games a year, and during the season the support needs to be 24x7. This support also includes the spring training camp at Port Charlotte, whose data center was folded into the cloud at the same time. The applications run the gamut from a homegrown SQL to a Windows application front-end and web-based Great Plains finance software. New applications need to be added in a matter of hours – not days and the Customer Relationship Management system runs on a proprietary application from Ticketmaster. With close to thirty different applications being run on a daily basis, it is a fast enterprise that needs a fast moving IT Department to keep it running smoothly. At this point, every new application that is introduced resides in the cloud; nothing sits on a physical server at either of the two locations. With the migration from 250 laptops for remote users to tablets, all users are now on the same system and every machine is always up-to-date. Agents, managers, scouts and anyone out in the field now has a tablet and can sign in from anywhere for all of their needs. Over the years the organization had been having problems with lost or stolen laptops, resulting in proprietary information going astray and sensitive information that could get into the wrong hands. With the cloud holding all the information, any missing tablet can be shut down immediately. This has made insurance much easier to deal with for the organization. Even more importantly, the ROI has been tremendous. Ramirez did some research recently to discover the actual return on the initial investment for the two data centers and was surprised to find the return was 24 months, far faster than originally planned. So hurricane or not, long playing season or short, with a totally automated system in the cloud, it is going to be a good season for the Tamp Bay Rays IT Department, every season. Our newsletters and blogs are written to provide you with tools and information to meet your IT and cloud solution needs. We invite you to engage in our online community by following us on Twitter @GMOCloud and 'Liking' us on Facebook.