Behind-The-Scenes Superbowl Tech

jfruhlinger writes "You might be a hardcore sports fan or might think of jocks with disdain, but if you're a geek you'll probably be intrigued by the tech behind the brand-new stadium where this weekend's Superbowl will be played. 84 Cisco access points, 70 wiring closets, 40,000 wired ports, 8 million feet of Ethernet cabling, 260 miles of fiber, 100 TB of storage — all on a single network."

884 APs

[zn0k]

There are 884 APs, not 84 as the summary claims.

84 APs would be pitiful. Cisco recommends no more than 35 users per AP radio. You can probably push that up to 50 for public access WiFi, maybe - if you're thin stretched - a little bit more as long as many clients are 5GHz devices. Given that many APs will be back of the house and not accessible to the public you wouldn't be able to serve more than one to two thousand users on 84.

The storage is cool

[afidel]

One thing I found interesting is that the Cleveland Indians are a big user of storage. When the player is in the hole (second next to bat) they can bring up any and every pitch they have ever received from the current pitcher and likely relievers. That means the metadata has to be fast enough to find the pitches and then the streaming media server has to be able to serve it up basically instantly if they want to view a couple of different at bats in the time they are in the hole, pretty cool IMHO.