Melbourne Cricket Club

A Winning Result for the Melbourne Cricket Club (MCC)

Background:

The MCC (as ground manager of the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG)) is:

“… committed to maintaining the MCG as a world class stadium providing the best possible customer service to its patrons, hirers, and members whilst ensuring that its unique history and heritage is appreciated and preserved…”.

Founded in 1838 and assuming occupancy of the MCG’s present site in 1853, the MCC has more than 103,000 members and a waiting list of over 230,000, making it the biggest sporting club membership within Australia. The MCC manages the stadium and has progressively expanded the MCG’s role as an entertainment centre and a world- class tourist destination. The MCG now hosts more than 90 days of events, largely cricket and football each year, with attendance exceeding 2.5 million persons annually.

The MCG is one of Australia’s greatest assets. As Australia’s most attended sports and entertainment stadium, the MCG is a multipurpose venue accommodating International Cricket, Australian Rules Football, concerts, dinners and other major functions on its natural turf arena and in the surrounding purpose built facilities.

The MCG is the home of Australian Rules Football and the birthplace of Test Match and One Day International Cricket. It currently hosts a minimum of 45 AFL Home and Away matches per annum, plus the Grand Final and a range of other finals matches. Together with 8 days of International Cricket and up to 35 days of 1st Class cricket matches, the latter being subject to the scheduling of other major events, this makes for a formidable schedule of major events.

“Given the tight timeframe, the solution deployment has exceeded our expectations. What’s more, Data^#3’s post implementation support has been faultless. With large-scale events occurring at the MCG on a weekly basis, their professionalism in responding to and rectifying any issues has been outstanding.”

Rey Sumaru, General Manager IT & Innovation, Melbourne Cricket Club.

The Challenge:

Managing a facility that hosts up to 100,000 people on any given week demands a reliable and robust technology platform to ensure the smooth operation of events.

The MCC’s legacy storage hardware was nearing the end of its lifecycle and was falling short of the service levels required by the business. The existing architecture no longer provided the scalability, flexibility and availability required by the business.

In terms of deployment, the main challenge was the fact that the MCG hosts sporting events throughout the year, therefore there was only a small window of opportunity for a new solution to be implemented (i.e. between the end of the AFL season in late September and the start of the international cricket season in November).

The Solution:

The MCC approached various vendor partners to seek advice on which business technology provider could offer the most appropriate solution.

Data^#3 was recommended based on a proven track record of delivering flexible and robust technology platforms for organisations in both the private and public sectors.

The chosen solution uses a combination of EMC VNX storage arrays to double capacity and performance and EMC VPLEX to provide continuous availability and data mobility across two data centres. The architecture provided allows mission-critical applications to remain up and running during a variety of planned and unplanned downtime scenarios, even in the event of a data center site failure.

“Two new VNX5200 arrays have doubled our storage capacity to around 70TB, plus we now have the agility we need to meet changing capacity demands and growth objectives,” says Rey Sumaru, General Manager IT & Innovation, Melbourne Cricket Club.

The Outcome:

Integrated seamlessly into the existing legacy system, the MCC now has a state-of-the-art storage technology platform that delivers unprecedented levels of efficiency and performance.

The active/active data centre model and VPLEX virtualisation architecture has enabled the MCC to federate information across data centres in real time, as well as deploy technology updates without any disruption to services or operation.

The solution has delivered a highly available and resilient IT infrastructure to help minimise risk and eliminate downtime. The active/active model has also strengthened disaster recovery capabilities, with SLAs now approaching zero Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and zero Recovery Time Objective (RTO).

“Given the tight timeframe, the solution deployment has exceeded our expectations. What’s more, Data^#3’s post implementation support has been faultless. With large-scale events occurring at the MCG on a weekly basis, their professionalism in responding to and rectifying any issues has been outstanding,” explains Sumaru.

“In Data^#3, we feel confident that we have a reliable, long-term technology partner, and one that deeply understands our IT requirements both now and into the future.”

Download the Case Study – Melbourne Cricket Club

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