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NFL's IT Chief Gears Up For His 25th Super Bowl
BobB-nw writes with this excerpt from NetworkWorld:
"NFL IT guru David Port claims he doesn't have a favorite football team, but on Sunday he'll be working his 25th Super Bowl. As the league's vice president of information technology, Port and his IT staff are responsible for building a temporary network to support NFL staff and thousands of journalists during Super Bowl week. Port starts preparing for each Super Bowl two years in advance, working with the city and venues where IT operations and media professionals will be based. More intensive planning starts about 11 months before the big game. Port explained that the NFL essentially built a small data center with IBM blade servers at the temporary headquarters in a local Marriott near the Super Bowl site. 'We built out an infrastructure with approximately 300 computers, PCs and laptops, and wired and wireless networks that are used for NFL core operations, for game production and business operations. Much of it is also for media,' Port said."
CNet is running a related story about the technology behind the Super Bowl, focusing on some of the visual effects viewers will see, as well as the hardware that makes everything happen.
Can I please get back the 5 minutes that I spent reading the article?. he article had no details about the uplink to the internet/ISP. No details as to the number of hits the web server can handle. No information (not even looking for details) about the firewall.. just a pointless article.
Offhand I can say that the NFL's needs are FAR greater in respect to media needs during the Superbowl as opposed to the World Series, but just in case, I found a link in about 5 seconds on Google.
"The best way to accelerate a Macintosh is at 9.8m/sec^2" -Marcus Dolengo
Handheld portable radio, tuned to the frequency in question, and a directional antenna. When signal's stronger, antenna's pointing at the source of the issue. Get two or three people working it, can triangulate the source pretty quickly. A lot of amateur radio operators do this sort of thing for fun, its called a "fox hunt".
I Worked for Dave and crew at the last Superbowl in Phoenix. I was the wireless vendor that the Superbowl hired for the outdoor wireless. Everything that Controlio says is true. He is a great guy, they have there act together and he is a good man to work for. He led the entire site from weeks before to the week after. Three weeks later I received a hand written thank you card and a gift from Dave. In a world of thankless days, I have kept the thank you note on my desk from Dave Port, He seems to have this game plan down.
I guarantee he did not watch any of the game tonight, he was running the show. Next week he will sleep!!