In 2019, the Los Angeles Dodgers found themselves in a squeeze play when it came to the organization’s data center.
“There were a number of problems,” says Ralph Esquibel, senior vice president of IT for the MLB team. “We had a lot of server sprawl — a lot of individual servers from different manufacturers. Part of the challenge was maintaining those various pieces of hardware and just thinking about patch management and updates. Our business was complaining about transaction speeds on certain applications. But like most sports teams, we have very limited resources when it comes to personnel. My team was just keeping its head above water.”
“Something had to change,” he adds.
That “something” ended up taking the form of a major data center modernization effort. The organization initially looked at shifting its entire infrastructure into a public cloud environment, but vendors’ proposals didn’t align with the club’s needs from a cost perspective, Esquibel says. “Our business is very cyclical, with a lot of ebbs and flows, and we wanted to have some sense of what our operating expenses would be.”
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