backups
The Los Angeles Angels may not have always had the best luck on the field, winning just a single World Series title in their 64 year history, but the baseball team has been “super lucky” when it comes to avoiding a data centre disaster says Director of Network Infrastructure Neil Fariss.
However, after a couple of close calls with fried circuit walls and a flood in the room next to their data centre which came inches away from them “losing everything”, Fariss and the IT department decided backups might just be worth the investment.
Building a brand new data centre was the first idea, but “we went away from that plan because our IT staff is very small, so building in a complete other environment, paying for it and managing it just wasn't on the cards,” he tells The Stack.
Instead, the MLB team opted to look for an external partner to deliver an entire backup solution and ended up completing the entire configuration in a matter of three weeks before Christmas 2016.
Cost versus value
A limited budget remained an impediment though, forcing Fariss’ department to focus their efforts, “the original scope was business continuity … which is file servers, application servers, domain controllers, database servers.”
The Angels' backup load, held on Veeam and managed by Dataprise, started at around 40 servers and is now stored across 82 servers at a size of 149.3 terabytes, Fariss says.
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“We started out fairly small and then grew from there. So we did the most critical stuff first, then started adding [data] that was minimally or moderately critical. And now we’re hitting everything we want to hit.”
Still though, measuring “cost versus value” remains “a total balancing act” when it comes to choosing what to properly back up and what to stick in the "cheapest, deepest GCP storage" you can find, he says, but “if the value is there, I’m paying for it; it could be expensive but it doesn’t matter because there’s value in it.”
What is business continuity for a baseball team?
Being a sports team, business continuity and disaster management also has to extend to the physical operations in your stadium, “it is [about], how do all these people get their jobs done if we have to vacate the stadium.
“It’s guest relations, it’s sales, it’s finance … You have to understand how they can get their job done if we’re somewhere else which leads into the whole idea of having our own firewall that we can manage and get people into super easy, that was huge.”
Additionally, while the Angels have so far avoided a severe natural disaster hitting their data centre, Fariss is aware of the threat posed by the team's Southern California location, with the Los Angeles area hit by severe fires earlier this year and seeing an uptick in seismic activity.
It's an issue not unfamiliar to other MLB teams either, Fariss highlights the Marlins preparing for hurricanes in Florida using backups that store data "almost in real time, getting their data replicated in seconds from here to here, but they have their own data centres, they spend a lot of money on having that available."
While the idea is one Fariss sees the value in, "they've got bigger IT departments than we do, and more money for whatever reason ... we had to come up with a solution that fits our budget."