Pac-10 Teams Score Competitive Insight with BlueArc Storage Solution

As college football season kicks off, BlueArc Corporation has announced that the Pacific-10 Conference (Pac-10) has expanded the use of its BlueArc Titan storage solution housed at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to bring even more teams fast access to dozens of terabytes of game footage. In the 2008-2009 season, all of the Pac-10 football, women’s volleyball and men’s and women’s basketball teams will take advantage of Titan’s world-record-holding storage performance and capacity to access opponents’ video for competitive analysis.

“Each Pac-10 school saves thousands of dollars per sport per year and gets game footage in minutes, instead of waiting hours—or longer—for tapes to arrive,” says Ken Norris, video operations director for UCLA Athletics. “Despite the best efforts of UCLA campus IT, our storage infrastructure technology didn’t deliver vendor-promised throughput. Fortunately, our project lead encouraged us to take advantage of the university’s investment in Titan to deliver games to the conference’s football teams.”

Pac-10 teams are required to deliver all of the seasons’ past game footage to opponents each weekend to analyze and update game strategy, placing extreme demands on storage capacity and throughput. Titan delivers sustained throughput at 10 gigabits per second and up to 100,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS), providing the speed and accuracy required for reliable, scheduled file transfer on a massive scale. For example, the Pac-10’s Titan storage infrastructure can transfer a video file for an entire football game—typically 20 gigabytes of data—in just minutes. Fast access to massive files replaces costly, time-intensive courier delivery of video footage.

Titan storage has been used by the Pac-10 for football game video transfer since 2007. In 2008, women’s volleyball, women’s basketball and men’s basketball teams also will use the Titan-based system to access game footage. Getting the Titan-based system ready for the increased load simply required the addition of 18 terabytes of Fibre Channel disk space to store more content.

In addition to more Pac-10 sports’ adoption of the Titan-based infrastructure, the system has earned broader recognition among academic IT professionals. The Pac-10 system earned a 2008 Innovations in Networking Award from the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC), which owns and manages the high-performance optical fiber network connecting schools, universities and research institutions in all of California’s 58 counties.