Melbourne Football Club Case Study

Too much information, too little time

Despite being one of the world’s oldest football clubs, the Dees had a very modern problem. Every game is captured from four angles in HD – and there are professional matches, state games, kids games and training each week to store, distribute and review. To help identify areas of improvement, winning strategies, and further strengthen their game, volunteers, professional players and coaches needed to be able to review this footage easily.

With over 200 hours of high-definition game footage generated each week, the club faced issues in processing, playing and storing video footage. To be usable by the team, the videos needed to be high quality and playback had to be simple. The system also had to be secure and accessible from anywhere. As the game footage piled up, the IT team called for a time-out.

Teaming up to create a solution

Coming on board as a major partner of Melbourne, CodeBlue was the natural choice to provide a solution. The challenge was to find the right solution to keep the club developing into the future.

“As a football club, we basically have the video storage requirements of a TV studio. There are hundreds of terabytes of HD video, with more generated each week. This equates to an enterprise storage requirement, with an extremely non-enterprise budget that’s constrained by the AFL.”
– Jimmie Martin, Melbourne Football Club IT Manager

While it seems like a relatively small issue, the storage and accessibility of game and training footage has a far-reaching impact. Players need to be able to review their performance to be able to improve, and coaches use the footage as the basis of coaching decisions, both in defence and offence.

A critical part of player development and game strategy is having the capability to see even the most minute of differences in detail. Therefore, the system needed to be streamlined and easy to use. Additionally, volunteer players and coaches needed to securely access the system remotely and at any time. Melbourne’s IT team also needed a robust backup and data recovery system that could be automated and secured both on-site and in the cloud. This would ensure that footage would be stored without manual intervention, and enable archives to be accessed easily if required.

“With CodeBlue’s help, we are now able to store data faster and easier as the process has been automated and we don’t have to worry about the risk of something going wrong with redundancies in place.”

– Jimmie Martin, Melbourne Football Club IT Manager.

With all these factors in mind, CodeBlue set out to find a solution that ticked all the boxes and would future proof the club.

A hybrid enterprise-level storage system with smart cloud backup and access

After extensive research, CodeBlue suggested Panzura Freedom NAS and Freedom Archive. This provides a single storage point for footage in the cloud, with active or frequently used data cached locally for quick access. The cloud storage and archive provides smart backup and redundancies, while the local cache lets players and coaches access recent and important footage without waiting days for downloads.

“CodeBlue’s pre-sale technical work was really great, and that’s what MFC needed. CodeBlue took our problem, researched vendors and possible solutions and brought fully-fledged ideas back to us. Unlike some providers, we didn’t have to do all the work ourselves, as their consultation process went over the course of months and provided real value. CodeBlue even went as far as setting up live replicas of servers in their offices to test solutions before they presented them to us.” – Jimmie Martin, Melbourne Football Club IT Manager

Going beyond a solution provider to a partnership

CodeBlue helped with the research and rollout of Panzura for Melbourne, including problem solving until the right solution was reached.

“When it looked like a few bugs would delay our rollout, CodeBlue stepped up and worked with Melbourne to troubleshoot and make sure the system operated perfectly. They didn’t simply provide a suggestion and then walk away – they persevered until we had the system up and working perfectly.” – Jimmie Martin, Melbourne Football Club IT Manager

Getting Panzura in place for the Melbourne Football Club means a perennial storage solution – solving their storage and access woes for the long-term. Everything is now securely backed up and readily available, and this saves the IT team up to 15 hours per week.

“CodeBlue are a true partner to Melbourne.”

– Jimmie Martin, Melbourne Football Club IT Manager

At a glance:

Customer: Melbourne Football Club
Industry: Sports/Community
Company size: Small/Medium (<200 employees)
Solution focus: Managed IT, Cloud Solutions
Products: Panzura