Pac-10 Teams Score Competitive Insight with BlueArc Storage

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 09/05/08

The Pacific-10 Conference (Pac-10), a group of sports teams from 10 colleges and universities, has expanded the use of its BlueArc Titan storage solution housed at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to store 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 access opponents' video for competitive analysis from Titan storage.

"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," said Ken Norris, video operations director, 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. In a statement, the vendor said its technology delivers sustained throughput at 10 gigabits per second and up to 100,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS), to handle file transfer on a massive scale. The video file for an entire football game typically is about 20 gigabytes of data.

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 required the addition of 18 terabytes of Fibre Channel disk space to store more content.