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The Arizona Cardinals professional American football team is using Dell servers and storage products as the core of its on-premises IT infrastructure, and has AI in its sights.
The Cardinals are based in Phoenix, where its stadium has a 65,000 fan capacity, and used systems integrator Insight North America from 2005 to provide it with an IT infrastructure featuring a data, voice, and video IP network spanning the stadium and the Cardinals' satellite facilities. There were more than 1,000 Cisco IP phones and video-conferencing consoles, 700 plasma screens for advertising in the stadium, and 100s of IBM PCs and servers involved in this.
Erik Jones became the Cardinals’ VP of information technology in July 2023, after the previous holder of that role, Mark Feller, retired. Jones inherited the existing on-premises IT infrastructure and a multi-year, multi-million-dollar partnership between the Cardinals and Cox Business dating from 2017. This extended an existing deal by Cox replacing CDW which had supplied the stadium’s Wi-Fi and networking infrastructure. It made Cox the exclusive technology solutions provider for both the team and University of Phoenix Stadium, with it providing Cisco-based telecommunications and internet services, cable television, video transmission services, Wi-Fi, and network infrastructure.
Jones found that the existing IT infrastructure was creaking, with slow processing, high latency, and support staff managing infrastructure issues, poor performance, and problem tickets.
He has modernized the Cardinals’ IT Infrastructure by working with Dell partner Integrated Media Technologies (IMT). Before joining the Cardinals, Jones was VP of Technology for the Seattle Kracken ice hockey team, and used IMT there for AWS-based sports and media asset management (MAM) work. IMT is a Dell Titanium partner and the integrator of a Dell IT stack for the Miami Dolphins football team and its Hard Rock stadium from 2021 onwards. All-in-all it was nicely placed to pick up IT work from the Cardinals.
The Cardinals now use Dell server and storage products for back office IT, game day video processing, scouting analytics, data protection and cyber-resiliency;
- PowerEdge R-Series servers for workloads including scouting analytics,
- AI Data Platform file storage (PowerScale) centralizes and accelerates massive media workflows and gives Cardinals media teams low-latency file performance to capture, edit and share game day content in real time,
- PowerStore provides unified, all-flash primary storage for applications like finance, business intelligence and day-to-day operations, replacing legacy systems that struggled with stability and scale,
- PowerProtect Data Domain appliances and PowerProtect Data Manager provide backup storage for fan data flowing through ticketing, retail and digital platforms,
- PowerProtect Cyber Recovery with Cyber Detect protects the Cardinals’ critical data with an isolated, intelligent recovery environment.
Jones said the old infrastructure’s problems have been sorted: “The things that used to keep us up at night have been resolved.”
The Cardinals' media team captures and processes hundreds of terabytes of gameday video content, used for social media, broadcasts, and fan engagement. This video processing is time-critical, Jones saying: “We’ve got roughly two to three hours to create a meaningful experience for 65,000-plus fans each gameday and live event.”
The Cardinals’ internal scouting and football operations platforms, which coaches and staff use to review video and evaluate players, run up to 10x faster than before. Scouts and analysts can access game film, player data, and insights, Dell says, instantly. Jones’ team are now considering ways to use AI to streamline fan entry, enhance retail and food and beverage experiences, and get more insights from the terabytes of scouting footage and analytics. Projects for facial recognition to streamline entry and AI-enabled retail and food and beverage transactions are already in development.
Jones said: “Without the infrastructure and the work we’ve done over the past year, none of the things we’re thinking about with AI would be possible … We are AI-prepared, which was a big core objective I outlined just three years ago."
Bootnote
We understand that Cisco equipment is used for the Cardinal’s stadium’s high-density Wi-Fi and core network, club communications, event security, and, with a 2025 deal, AI-ready networking, high-density Wi-Fi 7, and Hybrid Mesh Firewall-style cybersecurity. IMT, with Dell, provides the compute, video storage, data protection/resiliency stack.