Major League Baseball Re-Signs with Sun for Web Servers

by Alex Woodie

It's that time of year again. Spring training is winding down, teams are preparing for the long season ahead, and fans are eagerly awaiting the return of their favorite players. Along with the smells of hot dogs and freshly cut grass at ballparks across the country, the humming of Major League Baseball's refreshed army of Sun Microsystems Web servers will soon fill MLB's new state-of-the-art data center in New York City.

Sun announced this week that Major League Baseball's Advanced Media subsidiary has extended for another two years the contract it originally signed in 2001 for Sun servers, software, and services. Since 2000, the MLBAM subsidiary has operated Major League Baseball's official Web site, as well as the official Web sites for all 30 major league teams, which produce and distribute content for their particular teams but rely on MLBAM's centralized servers.

MLBAM says it chose Sun over IBM for its new content management and delivery system, which will handle everything from pitch-by-pitch updates of statistics and fantasy baseball games, to ticket sales and streaming broadcasts over the Internet. The organization's Web sites rely heavily on JavaServer Pages (JSP) technology to provide a customized look and feel for each team. In fact, with more than 30,000 JSPs active on any given day, MLBAM is among the largest JSP users in the world, Sun says.

In 2003, MLBAM's Web servers were called upon to cover 2,500 games, delivering more than 4 billion page views for 650 million visitors from around the world, making it the largest event producer in the world, Sun says. For the 2004 season, MLB will be relying on Sun to deliver expanded broadband capabilities, including live streaming video of up to 10 games daily through MLB.TV, streaming audio for more than 5,000 games, digital downloads of all playoff games, and live, hour-long pre-game shows. Other new capabilities will include pitch-by-pitch view of games, pre- and post-game shows and analysis, and enhanced search and on-demand capabilities for fans, as well as archives of every "at bat" to aid in player development, Sun says.

Serving such an array of digital entertainment is an intensive task and requires clustered Web servers and software that can handle unexpected shifts in demand. For example, when the New York Yankees acquired star shortstop Alex Rodriguez last year, it created a sudden spike for MLB Web servers, says Hal Stern, Sun Services chief technology officer, sports fan, and technical sponsor for Sun's MLB contract. "These are events you can't control," Stern says.

At the heart of MLB's expanded broadcasting capabilities will be Sun Fire V210, V240, 4800, and 15K servers (with one to four SPARC processors each) running the Solaris operating system, Sun's Java System Web Server, and the Digital Asset Management Reference Architecture, which will be hosted on a Sun Fire V480 server and the StorEdge L700 Tape Library. Sun's Digital Asset Management Reference Architecture is a software platform and implementation methodology that it co-developed with a Boston TV station last year in order to help media companies transition to a distributed and scalable method of delivering content and data. A team of Sun technicians has worked with MLBAM technicians to design and implement the new system.

Ironically, Sun's longtime rival Microsoft recently won exclusive license rights from MLB to broadcast streaming live video of ballgames and highlights to people with MSN premium subscriptions, which cost $10 per month. The multi-year license, for which Microsoft reportedly paid $40 million, was previously held by RealNetworks. All streaming video will be hosted on Major League Baseball's MLB.TV Web site, which runs on Sun hardware and software. MLB is offering monthly packages of streaming broadcasts for about $15 per month.

MLBAM's two-year contract with Sun is worth $25 million. The contract also includes Sun services for a second MLBAM data center, which will open in 2005.