Red Sox IT department caches in on World Series

The Boston Red Sox, newly crowned champs of Major League Baseball, traditionally haven't been known for team speed. Until recently, neither was the network the club used to support news reporters and photographers working postseason games at Fenway Park.

But the organization recently showed quickness in coming up with a system designed to give reporters faster access to Web sites and enable photographers to get pictures online more quickly while covering playoff games from the storied ballpark.

IT Director Steve Conley, who was reached the morning after the Sox dispatched the St. Louis Cardinals in Game 4 of the World Series, says the trouble began during the last regular season series between the Red Sox and New York Yankees in September. Members of the press working at Fenway complained of poor network response times, the result of dozens of people jamming the two bonded T-1 lines the Sox use to support the media, he says.

Conley knew things could only get worse with the Sox heading into the playoffs in October, given the inevitable increased media presence.

Rather than dealing with the long lead times and hassles of bringing up additional T-1s, Conley opted to install a proxy appliance from Blue Coat Systems that cached the Web sites most frequented by media members seeking statistics and other information as they reported on and wrote about the playoff games. Conley says the Proxy SG 800, which sits behind the organization's firewall, helped slash response times from a "noticeable" half-second or so to about one-twentieth of that.

"We didn't have any serious network issues the entire postseason," he says. "Sixty or seventy percent of our Internet traffic wound up going out of cache."

The more efficient network system, which also included additional wireless access points, let photographers on the field upload photos quickly to their organizations' Web sites while the games were in progress, Conley says.

The Red Sox exploited Blue Coat's system for caching capabilities, which is the technology that gave Blue Coat (formerly CacheFlow) its start. Blue Coat also offers anti-virus, anti-spyware and other applications on its appliances. Conley says the Red Sox will consider adopting some of that technology, including for its front office network.

"We haven't had much rest for the last couple of months," Conley says. "Hopefully, we'll be able to step back soon and look at what we need."