Red Sox Move to Colo at One Summer Street

Fenway Park may be a great place to watch a baseball game, but it's not the best place for a data center. Two weeks ago the Boston Red Sox moved their IT equipment from cramped administrative offices at Fenway to custom data center space at 1 Summer Street, one of Boston's most connected carrier hotels.

"The issue for us was that we had outgrown our data center," said Randy George, senior systems and network analyst for the Red Sox. "We had equipment overflowing from the data center into our employees' offices, and we had scaled past the power limitations as well. It was definitely a facilities issue that drove us to a colocated data center."

The Red Sox installed Ekinops optical transmission equipment to connect Fenway and 1 Summer Street , enabling a Fibre Channel and storage area network solution.

"We have all our financial applications (at 1 Summer Street), along with our scouting system and video analysis system, e-mail, back-end databases, and storage area networking. The brains of our operation are essentially at the data center now, and that's why the Ekinops gear is so instrumental," said George.

The move was planned in January, and completed just in time for the season. "We were under a lot of pressure to get all this done by Opening Day, and we did it," said George. "We had to pull a lot of strings to do it, but we successfully moved the weekend of March 23 and 24. It was completely transparent to users."

There was no immediate confirmation of reports that the Yankees had dispatched Bucky Dent with an RFP for colo space in the New York market, including a requirement for low-latency connectivity "at least one millisecond faster than the Red Sox' network."

Editor's note: It has come to our attention that this item's author, an admitted New York sports fan, was unable to complete the assignment without inserting gratuitous Yankee references. The management of Data Center Knowledge would like to apologize for this lapse, and extend our sincere wishes that the Red Sox' new data center will help the team enjoy a second-place finish in the AL East this season.