Philadelphia Eagles
The Best Offense Is a Good Data Defense for Super-Bowl Winning Football Team
Philadelphia Eagles
The NFL’s Philadelphia Eagles chose B2 Cloud Storage because it worked with the nearline on-prem storage they wanted to acquire, it worked with the media asset manager (MAM) they wanted to use, and it was one-fifth the price versus legacy cloud providers such as AWS.
With multiple championships behind them, the Philadelphia Eagles had decades of incredible content to mine and protect, but they needed to draft and train up some new technical assets to stay in contention. Slow data access, no geographic redundancy, and an aging, cumbersome, and failure-prone tape archive were all threatening the IT team’s championship mindset.
The IT team integrated a new Quantum QXS storage area network (SAN) and Mimir, a cloud-based video collaboration and production platform, for on-site media workflows, and added Backblaze B2 for storage—all so they can rapidly upload and access game day footage and photography. They retired their LTO-6 system and shifted hundreds of terabytes off of their SAN to a true cloud archive. And, they use Backblaze Cloud Replication to ensure that every byte is safely replicated to an additional remote data center.
After their offseason training level-up, the digital ops team found they were ready for the next postseason push: They had doubled their data protection, cleared out their LTO storage room, and opened up remote workflows to lessen the burden of game day all-nighters. Their archives are now easily accessible for future monetization and their infrastructure can scale during the coming seasons and beyond. Game on.
Like most NFL franchises, the Philadelphia Eagles employ a crew of media and production experts to showcase their world-class football team. Inspired by the loyalty and passion of their passionate fan base, they work to embody resilience, determination, and commitment to excellence in the efforts on and off the field. Serving a live audience of roughly 70,000 at every home game and a fan base in the millions, the digital operations team is responsible for capturing, protecting, and potentially distributing any piece of content the organization records.
The average NFL franchise generates 1,000 to 2,000 video clips—both 1080p and 4K—and 2,000 to 3,000 photos for every game. That means that some 17 times a year, an organization will generate 6–7TB of data they need to store, analyze, reuse, and archive, typically all in one night—and the figure is higher when it’s a big win. No one wants to miss the star player’s pre-game fit check or the game-winning touchdown.
And while every game night generates about 7TBs of new data, there are also typically petabytes of essential data in the archives waiting to be called into the game. This is the reality in today’s saturated media landscape: the preservation and consumption of every variety of content from game day footage to community events to press conferences and player interviews is both a tradition and necessity for professional football teams. When your team starts doing well, those archives get tapped more and more to create retrospectives or team documentaries.
The Eagles, like many professional sports franchises, processes multiple thousands of video clips and photos adding up to multiple terabytes of data on game nights to keep the players and fans engaged and on fire.
The Eagles used an aging SAN for production data with archives stored on LTO-6 tape. That was, until the tape library fumbled the ball, going down for weeks at a time, and always when someone needed something out of the archives. It became so problematic that they stopped archiving content altogether, opting to max out their SAN to ensure fast access. On top of that, the tape system lived in a server room at the stadium just down the street from the production team’s offices—not far away enough to truly call it a disaster recovery copy.
The question for the team was, “How do we get faster, more nimble, more digital, more cloud friendly, and ultimately more useful and suited to the company?” The first step: Find a cloud provider they knew would win on the balance sheet and in their workflow, and would play nicely with other cloud services. They chose B2 Cloud Storage because it worked with the nearline on-prem storage they wanted to acquire, it worked with the media asset manager (MAM) they wanted to use, and it was one-fifth the price versus legacy cloud providers such as AWS.
With Backblaze B2 on the squad, they shifted hundreds of terabytes from their old SAN to Backblaze without any time-outs necessary thanks to Backblaze Universal Data Migration (UDM), then put it on the field with a brand new Quantum QXS for nearline storage. Then, they integrated Mimir, a video collaboration and production platform that includes production asset management, archive, and object-store integration, to keep everything organized and on time. Whenever a file is uploaded to Mimir, it’s automatically stored in Backblaze B2 via Mimir’s file indexer system Kelda. This covered the game day action—their production team had fast access to recently recorded content, and it allowed them to work more flexibly from home, which was especially important on those late nights after a game.
Next they moved on to protecting every part of their game plan: To ensure all of the content was doubly secure off-site, they migrated the remaining data on their LTO-6 tape system, again using UDM. Then, they utilized Backblaze Cloud Replication to ensure that every byte uploaded to a nearby cloud region was safeguarded in a more distant cloud region to protect them from any regional disasters.
The team added another layer of protection with backups that were truly off-site across the country versus down the street. They made room in their offices. They empowered their production team by giving them instant access and fast workflows so they can work without slowdowns. And, they freed up IT staff time spent managing all that tape and old hardware. It all added up to a big win for the IT team, the franchise, and the fans.
The Eagles freed up physical space in their offices by removing old hardware—being able to show leadership the tangible result was game-changing.
CHESA is a media technology systems integrator that specializes in advanced media technology systems and media and entertainment workflow solutions from capture through delivery. Drawing on decades of experience, the company designs, develops, and deploys robust, modern systems that leverage industry-leading technologies to help clients achieve success.
Backblaze is the cloud storage innovator delivering a modern alternative to traditional cloud providers. The Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage platform offers high-performance, secure object storage that customers use to develop applications, manage media, secure backups, build AI workflows, protect from ransomware, and more. With pricing at a fraction of other cloud providers, free egress up to 3x the amount stored, and an S3 compatible API, Backblaze B2 helps businesses use their data in open cloud workflows with the providers they prefer.
