Dell and FC Liverpool are another good virtualization experience.

In modern sports with huge stadiums, live broadcasts of sports events on hundreds of channels of different countries at the same time, a large number of sensors that record scored goals in football, handball and hockey, as well as sensors that record the intersection of the finish line in all sorts of races on different vehicles, one of the most important roles are played by high-quality IT infrastructure. In our blog, we already wrote about how Dell thought out solutions in 2010 helped the Catherham team , a novice in Formula One, successfully and at a very fast pace to model the car and start the race.

Today we will tell you about how in the same year 2010, Dell helped the leadership of the Liverpool football club to select more convenient IT solutions that correspond to the current tasks of the club. Using Dell's comprehensive solutions, one of the best football clubs in England managed to free up about 75% of the usable space in the data center, improve the learning environment for young talents from the Liverpool FC academy, and provide a considerable "margin of safety" when working with large amounts of information. , having chosen the EqualLogic PS6000X Storage Network for this task. Read more about how the Dell team helped the team of the Liverpool Football Club read below under Habrakat.

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Dell and Liverpool - Stadium Upgrade

Liverpool is one of the best clubs in the English Premier League. The history of the club is rich in trophies and cups. The team is the leader among the English teams in terms of the number of victories in the UEFA Champions League (formerly the tournament was called the European Cup), the team has 5 victories in the finals of this championship (more cups only from the Spanish club Real Madrid - 9 and the Italian club Milan - 7).

From the moment the club was created to this day, Enfield is the club’s native stadium. After the creation of the stadium in 1884, it was repeatedly modernized and, at the moment, the stadium's capacity exceeds 45,000 people.
To date, Enfield belongs to the highest 4th category according to the rating of UEFA stadiums.

This is what this sports facility looks like at fully filled stands:



The Dell team was tasked with optimizing the stadium's IT infrastructure. Before we talk about the decisions that were used, let's estimate what IT equipment can be used for when broadcasting sports events like football, basketball or hockey.

Computerized complexes that are equipped with facilities like "Enfield" help:

• store and process video taken from dozens of video cameras aimed at the field in real time;
• stream video for hundreds of TV channels from around the world;
• track cameras in the stands for security control.

The list, of course, is far from complete.

So, the main tasks for Dell were 2: minimize the power consumption of the stadium and simplify the management of available IT resources. Both quests have been successfully completed. In addition to this, thanks to virtualization, it was possible to reduce the number of servers used, which resulted in significant space savings (75% of the total space that was previously filled with iron, after optimization, was freed). Also, with a decrease in the amount of useful iron, accompanying the IT infrastructure has become much easier.

To optimize the home stadium of Liverpool FC, 4 PowerEdge R710 servers and 2 PowerEdge R610 servers were selected, and the storage structure was improved using the Dell EqualLogic PS6000X storage network.

The strengths of the PowerEdge R610 and PowerEdge R710 servers at the time of introduction into the infrastructure of the Enfield stadium were:

• reduced power consumption and improved performance compared to servers of past generations;
• logical arrangement of components and power supply in servers, compatibility with servers of previous and next generations (which were not yet available in 2010);
• support for Intel VT FlexMigration technology, which makes it possible to integrate servers of different generations with Intel Xeon processors;
• availability of an interactive LCD monitor on the server that displays data from voltage and temperature sensors.

VMware vSphere 4 software was pre-installed on the servers, a brief overview of the capabilities of the 4th line of VMware vSphere can be found in this article . New server models available in the current Dell PowerEdge lineup support the latest versions of VMware vSphere ESX and ESXi. Also in these models there is the possibility of virtualization using Citrix XenServer; Microsoft Hyper-V based on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. More detailed information about the Dell PowerEdge R610 , Dell PowerEdge R710 servers , as well as about 2 other Dell PowerEdge R620 and Dell PowerEdge R720 servers from the PowerEdge line , which replaced the outdated models of 2010, can be found on the official Dell website.

The Dell EqualLogic PS6000X is a fault-tolerant virtualized iSCSI storage area network with intelligent features and automation support designed to simplify administration and speed up deployment.
The strengths of the EqualLogic PS6000X at the time of introducing the Liverpool FC home stadium into the IT infrastructure were:

• good balance of performance and capacity thanks to SAS hard drives at 10,000 rpm;
• compatibility with other arrays of the PS series for building multi-level storage networks;
• ease of management and availability of wide scalability;
• high fault tolerance due to the presence of hot-swappable redundant components.

In addition to installing and configuring servers, the Dell IT team also conducted training seminars for Liverpool FC employees as part of Dell Education Services . During the training course, the possibilities of EqualLogic automatic load balancing were demonstrated, as well as ease of scalability and performance under heavy loads.

Dell and FC Liverpool Academy - help young talents

After the optimization process at the stadium was completed, the Dell team was tasked with updating the IT equipment at the Liverpool Football Club Academy.



With the staff of the Academy of FC Liverpool, one of which was Phil Roscoe , Dell agreed to allocate 18 Dell OptiPlex 960 desktops , of which 3 were equipped with the high-performance Nvidia NVS 420 Quadro graphics card. Thanks to the top-end (at that time) 4-core Intel processors ( Intel Q9400 series ), as well as the installation of high-speed, high-capacity memory modules, the performance of computers with which the academy was equipped was very good. The compact size of the Dell OptiPlex in the “Small Form Factor” configuration (28.90 cm X 8.50 cm X 32.30 cm) made it possible to save space in the training classes of the academy, which also turned out to be a pleasant and useful bonus.

Viewing matches to analyze the actions of individual players and teams as a whole is one of the important components of training young football players. For more productive work in this direction, Dell has provided the Academy of Liverpool FC 24-inch Dell UltraSharp monitors and a Dell 4210X projector, allowing you to watch games in high resolution and with full stereo sound.
A comparison table of the characteristics of the Dell 4210X and DELL 7700 FullHD projectors (the new model from the Dell projectors line ), photos of devices, as well as the characteristics of the Dell UltraSharp monitors can be viewed at the bottom of this article under the spoilers.

For greater student mobility, Dell has provided the Academy with five Dell Latitude E5500 laptops with Intel P8400 series processors . At the moment, this laptop model is already outdated, but in 2010 such laptops made it possible to effectively solve a large number of practical problems.

Thanks to the cooperation of Liverpool FC and Dell, the conditions for training students of the Liverpool FC Academy have improved significantly, which had a positive effect on the realization of the potential of young people in the following games.



So what are the results?

• Due to virtualization, it was possible to significantly reduce the energy consumption of the IT infrastructure of the Liverpool FC home stadium with a concomitant reduction in maintenance costs and free up more than half of the space previously occupied by servers and other IT equipment.
• Thanks to the use of Dell EqualLogic technology, a large amount of free space was reserved for data storage (with a margin of several years ahead).
• Improved learning conditions for students of the Academy of FC Liverpool.

Below is a list of the iron used in the framework of interaction between Dell and the football club Liverpool. Under the spoilers you will find additional information and tables with comparative characteristics of devices used for virtualization of the Enfield stadium in 2010, as well as current models of devices of the same class presented in the current Dell lineup.

Equipment:
1. Dell PowerEdge R710 and R610 Servers with Intel Xeon 5500 Processors






2. Dell EqualLogic PS6000X




3. Dell OptiPlex 960 Intel Q9400




4. Dell Latitude E5500 Intel P8400




5. 24-inch Dell UltraSharp monitors




6. Dell 4210X Projector




7. Nvidia NVS 420 Quadro Graphics Cards