Sports Web site goes virtual as it gears up for expansion

A new Web site that combines sports news, fantasy competition and social networking is relying on server and I/O virtualization to become more flexible as it gears up for a big expansion.

Open Sports, started by Sportsline.com founder Mike Levy, has about 100 Dell servers in an Atlanta collocation data center for a Web site that handles 200,000 unique visitors a month. The service was launched in August and is still in beta. Visitors should be in the millions per month by next fall, and Levy says he'll buy "as many [servers] as it takes" to handle the expected increase in traffic.

"I give [my CIO] the instruction that the system better not fail," Levy notes.

Open Sports has virtualized much of its data center with VMware's hypervisor and Xsigo's I/O virtualization platform, the latter of which is integrated into VMware’s VirtualCenter, allowing for centralized management of virtual servers and virtual I/O. (Compare server products.)

With VMware, Open Sports is running about eight to 12 virtual machines per server. But I/O is often a huge bottleneck on virtual machines, forcing companies to buy bigger servers in order to increase I/O, according to Xsigo co-founder and executive chairman Ashok Krishnamurthi.

Xsigo's I/O Director is a hardware/software combination that lets you deploy storage and network resources to any server at any time, without being limited by physical cables and network interface cards, says marketing vice president Jon Toor. The hardware piece is a high performance switching fabric. Basic Xsigo packages start at $30,000 and large configurations run about $200,000.

At Open Sports, the Xsigo technology allows each server to use just two InfiniBand cables, rather than as many as 16 Ethernet cables, Levy says. Additional benefits include lowering the cost of connectivity to servers, flexibility, remote management and redundant connectivity. "We don't want any single point of failure bringing us down," Levy says.

Open Sports, in Deerfield Beach, Fla., features sports news, fantasy leagues and what Levy describes as more interactive social networking features than are found on rival sites. For example, the site gives users the ability to comment on live scoreboards, and even place wagers, he says.

With a goal of 100% uptime, the company's first big challenge will be the first round of the NCAA men's basketball tournament in March. "The first two days of the NCAA basketball tournament are the two biggest days on the Internet for sports because you've got 16 games each day," Levy says.

Open Sports has marketing deals with John Elway and Dennis Rodman, and its management team includes former NFL punter Don Silvestri.