Touring a NFL Stadium Data Center!

We take you for a tour of the secret data center found deep within Levi's Stadium, the home of the San Francisco 49ers #49ers #nfl

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Timestamps
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00:00 Introduction
01:06 On the 49ers Field
01:39 The Hidden 49ers Data Center at Levi's Stadium
05:05 The Executive Huddle for Game Day Metrics
07:48 Touring the Levi's Stadium Press Box
09:43 Wrap-up

[Zach_Miller]

Was excited when I saw this video title but bummed out that there was no in depth tour of what's actually going on in there, but the same 12 b-roll shots on repeat. Would be super cool to hear what they are actually running instead of just a high-level overview that we already could assume

[CamdogXIII]

I got to provide network support for my local NFL Stadium a couple months ago. We specialize in the vendor they use, and wanted us on site to help troubleshoot/resolve issues if they popped up. Very cool to see all the tech behind the scenes. What was really interesting was the metrics reported on network usage. 2TB of data uploaded to instagram, 3TB uploaded to Twitter, etc.

[nellermann]

Carriers didn't want you to see their DAS systems? Many of the antennas around the stadium and shopping malls aren't wifi, they are DAS for cellular providers.

[grayrabbit]

I worked many years at an arena which had hockey/basketball/indoor football. Being in the minor leagues, we definitely didn't have the proper budget. Some years I was lucky to get $500/year for parts. At one point, all of the building's credit card transactions went through a computer I found by the side of the road...and it stayed that way for 2 years!

[acubley]

09:20 "I always thought there'd be 30, 40, maybe 49 folks or so..." Nice!

[blindside]

How do we get Patric to the Super Bowl to do some behind the scenes of the same kind of stuff?
Because this stuff is super cool. Like the fact these stadiums are equipped to broadcast to 50+ Million people is insane!

[ckennylin]

I'm curious whether are "dark" cell antennas installed throughout the stadium that get activated for games and events. With fixed price plans being the norm, most people don't bother switching to WiFi unless their signals are bad.

[BertoK]

As a life-long 49ers fan, and been to Levi's a couple times, this was very cool to see.

[scott]

Not a stadium employee, but I do work at a national lab in a division with a very large particle accelerator, the IT infrastructure is nuts and rather interesting, not only does it exist to monitor various gauges and sensors or to control various devices in a gigantic building, it exists to support various experiments. Also cool thing, some of the computer hardware around here is a mix between brand new and outdated, sometimes outdated by decades, sometimes you see a PCI FPGA that 25 years ago cost $15k, sometimes you see cutting edge modern hardware

[markpriceful]

Awesome behind the scenes tour! So cool to see infrastructure hiding in plain sight that supports our every day life. Great work Patrick!

[kenbeliveau]

Very cool to see the data center at a stadium. I noticed you kept showing the cell phone antennas but never showed the DAS area where all the phone equipment is and what it takes for all those people to be able to share on social media. They don't all log into the local WiFi a lot of people just use their local carrier for access and not WiFi. So seeing the DAS at a stadium would be really cool

[DaNiePred]

Nice inside view of that Stadium from an IT-Nerd perspective 😀
Can you do something similar for the Sphere in Vegas? Guess it will be awesome to see the details of that huge screen and how it is fired up with data etc.

[ltitus]

I would love to see what their core switches look like!! Fully saturated fiber goodness!

[benjaminlynch]

The amount of cabling is insane. I can’t even imagine how many miles or cable there are or how long it took to install all of it.

Also curious what the bandwidth is for their ISP. Has to be at least 100G, right?

[Tortelli-NL]

Would have been cool to have more detailed information about amount of accesspoints, total bandwidth capacity and data usage during an game.

[LongerThanAverageUsername]

2 min worth of content stretched out to 11 by repeating that same exact thing over and over and over.

[IamBananas]

The broadcast trucks typically connects to the stadium as well, uncompressed 4K ferrying around to those press boxes and all the cameras and microphones capturing the game and fans. It wouldn't surprise me to see some Evertz s gear in there

[mattmcclendon]

IBM gave me a tour of the data center at the Mercedes Benz Dome in Atlanta a couple of years ago. Awesome.

[litz]

You should see if you can tour Mercedes Benz Stadium in Atlanta.

It's a little bit newer, but has two interesting features you might be interested in:

1) there is no copper networking in the entire building. Everything is end run as optical (and converted at the endpoint if needed).
2) the absolutely massive Halo scoreboard requires its own equally massive dedicated video processing system. And there are two of them for redundancy.

[itsandrehall]

Awesome video!! As a football fan and an IT professional it's often overlooked of all the technical infrastructure it takes to run a football stadium.