Dallas Cowboys Apply Latest Advancements in Information Technology to Gain Competitive Edge on the Football Field
4 November 2006
Isilon(R) Systems, the leader in clustered storage, today announced that the NFL's Dallas Cowboys, the team whose innovations include the Shotgun offense and Flex defense, are using Isilon IQ and an all digital workflow as their latest weapon to raise competitiveness on the football field. Using Isilon IQ clustered storage as a core component of its digital workflow, the Dallas Cowboys 25 member coaching staff is able to instantly access and review the franchise's entire library of raw and cross-filtered game footage and statistical data from nearly two seasons of NFL competition and transform this information into new breakthroughs in game planning and strategy.
"The Dallas Cowboys have always sought to provide our coaches and players with innovative, forward-looking tools that give them every possible advantage before they ever take the field on game day," said Dallas Cowboys Owner and General Manager, Jerry Jones. "By working with Isilon, we have given our coaching staff an invaluable tool in the weekly race to analyze our upcoming opponent and develop a winning game plan."
Each week, the Dallas Cowboys video department staff receives game video covering every game played from the prior week, including footage of their upcoming opponents. This video (one each for offensive plays, defensive plays and special teams plays) is digitized and uploaded to the Cowboys' Isilon storage cluster, then overlaid with detailed situational data -- down and distance, among many other data points. Each game generates approximately 20 gigabytes of data. The Dallas Cowboys video staff then use these video and data assets to create more than 120 different filtered categories ("Third down and long," "First down running plays," etc.) based on game situation, creating more meaningful insights for the coaches. They are then made available to more than 25 coaching workstations located throughout the Cowboys' training and practice facility.
"Coaching football today is like a chess game. And the better our guys can understand what our opponents are thinking and doing, the more successful we'll be," said Robert Blackwell, Director of Coaching Video, Dallas Cowboys. "Video study -- and lots of it -- is the key to that understanding."
The size of the Cowboys' video collection, combined with the rate of new additions, strained its traditional storage system and forced administrators to navigate a complicated maze in order to modify or expand capacity and performance. By creating a single, modular and expandable pool of networked storage, Isilon IQ enables the Dallas Cowboys to efficiently and cost- effectively store not just the current season's games, but also the entirety of last season, providing the coaching staff with a much deeper database from which to customize footage and statistics of opponents and formulate more precise, well-researched game plans to take onto the field.
"The Dallas Cowboys use of Isilon IQ to store and maximize their game footage and statistics demonstrates how this storied franchise is on the cutting edge of marrying state-of-the-art technology with the best talent in football to produce a winning combination," said Brett Goodwin, VP of Marketing & Business Development, Isilon Systems. "Isilon clustered storage products enable businesses to transform their information into breakthroughs and the Cowboys' innovative use of Isilon IQ to speed the time to critical game plan decisions represents that the power of these breakthroughs reaches all the way from the video and data department to the gridiron."
Isilon IQ delivers the industry's first single file system that unifies and provides instant and ubiquitous access to the rapidly growing stores of digital content and unstructured data, eliminating the cost and complexity barriers of traditional storage architectures. OneFS(R) 4.5 is a unified operating system software layer that powers all of Isilon's award-winning IQ family of clustered storage systems including the Isilon IQ 1920, 3000, 6000, Accelerator, and EX 6000, which are available immediately.
About Isilon Systems
Isilon Systems is the worldwide leader in clustered storage systems and software for digital content, enabling enterprises to transform data into information -- and information into breakthroughs. Isilon's award-winning family of IQ clustered storage systems combines Isilon's OneFS operating system software with the latest advances in industry-standard hardware to deliver modular, pay-as-you-grow, enterprise-class storage systems. Isilon's clustered storage solutions speed access to critical business information while dramatically reducing the cost and complexity of storing it. Information about Isilon can be found at http://www.isilon.com .
NOTE: The names of companies mentioned herein are the trademarks of their respective owners.
Source: prnewswire
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