IT and baseball: Behind the scenes with the Cleveland Indians

Cleveland Indians’ manager Eric Wedge has never penciled Whitney Kuszmaul into his starting lineup, but behind the scenes the franchise’s IT guy makes sure the team is up to speed on technology, and relishes every moment of it.

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“You’re working on stuff that’s a little bit cooler,” says Kuszmaul, network manager for the Indians. “It’s not every day people get to support servers that are doing nothing but statistical analysis on baseball players.”

Kuszmaul grew up in North Carolina as an Atlanta fan, and says he’ll root for the Indians “only if we’re not playing the Braves.” After moving to Ohio, one day he was sitting in the stands of an Indians game and said “this place has to have an IT arm.” Now he has spent nine years working for the Cleveland baseball team, and Kuszmaul is a believer in the organization’s commitment to IT, saying he believes the team is among the majors’ top five organizations when it comes to technology.

“It’s not bleeding edge but it’s very cutting edge,” says Kuszmaul, who’s part of an IT department with about 10 employees. “I’d be lying if I said no one else did this in baseball. But we are one of the few shops that have their own custom development staff and write their own custom applications.”

Those custom apps include scouting, drafting, ticket sale analysis, and injury tracking programs. The team also “created a new department in 2007 to analyze in more detail the statistics on player data,” he says.

Kuszmaul’s main responsibility is managing the franchise’s servers, storage and business applications. In the past year, he has helped the Indians triple the size of their data center to accommodate storage growth, a new VoIP system, and power and cooling needs.

The use of video to help the team analyze players and opponents is a major driver of storage needs. Players, for example, are able to use touch screen systems that let them search and view prior at-bats and make strategy adjustments that might help them succeed in future plate appearances. All those video clips add up to multiple terabytes worth of storage needs.

The Indians brought their new data center online at the stadium before this season, with upgraded power and cooling equipment to replace an undersized UPS system. With the Indians, the baseball offseason is actually the busy season for the IT department, as the company and its 250 users are “busy with retail sales, ticket sales, spring training, and prep for the season,” Kuszmaul says. That made coordinating downtime crucial for the move to a new data center, but it was worth it. By moving from a 260-square foot to a 670-square foot data center, and from five tons of cooling to 40 tons, the team was able to alleviate problems related to space, power and cooling.

The franchise has also upgraded its storage with a NetApp FAS3050 system with 30TB and CommVault’s Simpana backup software. In the 20-rack data center, almost a full rack is devoted to storage, Kuszmaul says. Kuszmaul is running mostly HP servers virtualized with VMware, with numerous Microsoft applications such as SharePoint, Exchange and SQL Server. Overall, the team has 35 physical servers and 54 virtual machines at the stadium, with another four physical boxes off-site.