X Games Live: Server City Keeps Summer X Games’ Backbone Rockin’

Deep inside ESPN’s main broadcast compound, in a tent-sided structure that has enough portable air conditioning to tame the heat wave that the middle of the country continues to deal with, is Roy Garray, ESPN’s senior electronic systems support engineer. His task at the 17^th Summer X Games is to manage the vast array of high-seed, high-capacity data servers that act as the storage solution for the EVS systems for entire Games campus. The network’s multi-Gigabit connectivity ingests, static and retrieves all types of static and animated graphics, video and still pictures to the Vizrt system, delivering that as needed to the broadcast and post departments supporting summer X Games.

What’s different this year, says Garray, is that in the past, each workstation would keep its data locally and, after it was finished working on it, it would send it to his server farm. This year, every workstation’s data lives in his Garray’s servers and each workstation works on their pieces of it by accessing it directly.

“That means higher speeds, faster throughput for the entire system,” says Garray. “It’s especially good since we’re doing 2D and 3D simultaneously — it’s twice the amount of data to handle from the left and right cameras. This helps keep up with the demand.”

Check out more of SVG’s comprehensive live X Games 17 coverage from Los Angeles by CLICKING HERE.