How the Detroit Pistons future-proofed its on premises storage with InfiniBox

The Detroit Pistons basketball team has saved management time and future-proofed its data infrastructure by consolidating its on premises storage from three vendors down to one.

Since arriving in Detroit in 1957, the Pistons have won three National Basketball Association (NBA) Championships - 1989, 1990, and 2004. In 2019, the club opened its $90 million, 185,000 square-foot Henry Ford Detroit Pistons Performance Center campus, the team’s practice facility and corporate headquarters.

Paul Rapier, vice president of IT at the Detroit Pistons explains that the team’s on premises storage was struggling to store increasingly large quantities of game footage and images, leading it to consolidate its old systems through InfiniBox.

All of the NBA side’s games are recorded using multiple camera angles, with video footage stored alongside many high-quality photos of action from the games. The business side of the Pistons uses the footage and photos for marketing, such as Instagram posts, ads, and highlight reels. On the basketball side, the video content is used for training, coaching, and improvement.

On premises storage remains a key part of the Detroit Piston’s data set-up because the video editing team needs fast access to the stored content to turn around finished videos in good time.

“The editing team and the marketing team here, we just haven’t found anything that would meet their needs to do all this video – to be able to edit at the speed that they need to edit – without having it on premises and with a fast array. It has to meet their needs,” Rapier explains.

“The only thing I’m using the cloud for now is stuff they don’t touch very often. When we say we have three years of [video] probably most of the three years ago is up in the cloud.”

Rapier explains to ITPro how the Detroit Pistons has overhauled its approach to data storage to streamline workflows for its teams and future-proof its systems.

Storing massive amounts of video on demand

The Pistons keeps three seasons of video, which at 82 games a season can add up to a lot of demand for storage .

“I’m trying to get the team to focus out of all those camera angles and all that data what exactly do we need because right now we keep three seasons and it’s a lot,” Rapier tells ITPro .

Rapier says that the team had some performance issues with its previous storage solution, with the arrival of 4K video putting new demands on its on premises storage. As a result, it began to look for an upgrade.

“Now we are talking about going to 8K and I just wanted to make sure we were prepared and could meet the needs of the business going forward. When we put the [previous] solution we had in, none of that was on the table. It was pre-Covid and the business has changed a lot over the years,” he said.

The previous storage needed more manual process to maintain it which mean the IT team had to move data around and keep it patched, he said.

“I have a small team here, I just don’t have the staff to be in this thing all the time upgrading it and patching and all that. Especially during the game days, I just need it to work.” Freeing up the time spent on managing storage means the tech team has more time for other projects they need to work on.

The Pistons selected Infinidat’s InfiniBox as its enterprise storage option, using it to consolidate the applications and workloads from three different storage vendors into InfiniBox. This now provides the storage capacity, performance, and advanced capabilities for the team’s VMware environments, SQL environments, and various file applications and workloads, including data stores, video, and file archives.

This also removed the need for multiple storage boxes with different user interfaces and different operating systems and multiple service plans.

Installation of the InfiniBox in a single rack within the team’s main data facility at the Pistons Performance Center took place in a single day and went live in February 2023.

The money, resources, and personnel required to manage multiple arrays from three different vendors led to inefficiencies, waste, and rising costs , said Infinidat. By making the switch, storage management time has been cut by 75% which has also driven CapEx and OpEx savings, while the upgrade has more than doubled efficiency and improved performance by three times, the company tells ITPro .

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“We were still in season when this was going on and I needed it to be as smooth as possible – and it was. Having something go perfectly smooth in a day is always a good thing,” Rapier says.

“We reduced cost and time to manage , we had multiple storage arrays and now we are down to the Infinidat, so time from a management perspective and a patching perspective definitely savings there and in performance as well,” he adds.

“We’ve actually hired two additional editors with no issues with performance, which has been huge too, so it’s allowing us to be more efficient and add some additional folks to get things done.”

The new storage system largely looks after itself. “I very rarely log into it at all, at the moment. It’s nice having something that operates with no issues and I haven’t received any complaints of latency when our backups are running: it’s basically taken that completely off my plate,” Rapier says.

Putting in the new system has also helped to make it easier to have discussions around the broader approach to data, he adds.

“Putting the Infinidat in was really step one for us. It’s made everyone outside of IT understand how important this data is, and how important it is to have space, how important performance is, and how important it is to think about that part of IT when we make decisions related to marketing and the video we store. This has made those conversations easier.”

The next step for the Detroit Pistons is adding more storage capacity, which will come online in the near future. “It’s like moving to a bigger house: you fill it up and I’m sure that team will make use of the space,” he says.