LAS VEGAS – Jose Bautista’s epic bat flip after hitting the go-ahead homer in Game 5 of the American League Division Series final last year was one of the great moments in Major League Baseball (MLB) history.
Now you can relive that play in less than a minute on the new MLB.TV app for iOS and Android thanks to a storage backend provided by EMC Corp. And, it’s just not that crazy 56-minute seventh inning you can watch instantly, but the entire game in HD.
MLB.TV, through the EMC Isilon scale-out storage systems, manages more than 1.5 petabytes of data per year. The MLB.TV app is meant for fans of America’s pastime along with professional baseball scouts and fantasy sports fans. This service is available as a two-screen experience on your TV, tablet, or smartphone.
MLB has its own Internet company called Major League Baseball Advanced Media or MLBAM. This unit manages complete up-to-date baseball data and interactivity. This app manages live video along with archived games from the 2015, 2014 seasons. This includes nearly 18,000 broadcasts from local, away, national and Spanish language programs.
Each game generates eight to nine terabytes of new data which was putting a strain on metadata components of MLBAM’s prior file systems making it difficult to sustain transactional performance.
Joe Inzerillo, senior vice president and CTO for MLBAM, said live streaming is “like turning on a fire hose.” But with Isilon, metadata acceleration is built in rather than sequestered separately from the storage like previous infrastructures.
“A big part of that is being able to consolidate file systems on one volume. Anytime 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,” Inzerillo said.
The 600 employee MLBAM is using EMC Isilon S series scale-out storage systems for streaming media and video-on-demand. It also supports more than one million subscribers. The Web component of MLB.TV is stored on Isilon X-Series clusters configured on Isilon SyncIQ replication software for disaster recovery.
In addition to Isilon, MLBAM implemented EMC Symmetrix VMAX 10K machine to run its apps along with its Oracle databases for e-commerce and stats.
Finally, the EMC VNX unified storage is being used for back office apps such as Microsoft Exchange.
EMC is leveraging its work with MLB for other sports such as NHL hockey.
Recently the National Hockey League and MLBAM announced a digital media rights partnership. NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman and MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred jointly announced the six-year agreement that will see a fan experience by creating a fully integrated global hub of digital content featuring video, live game streaming, social media, fantasy, apps, along with statistical and analytical content.
