Fulham FC: Sticking IT in the goal

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It has been a great season for Fulham FC, with a decent finish in the Premier League, manager Roy Hodgson receiving an abundance of praise and now a Europa League final.

As the team gets ready in Hamburg for the biggest game in the club’s history, one man going over to cheer them on will be Fulham’s IT manager Nicholas Pendlebury.

IT PRO caught up with the man himself to talk about why it isn’t just on the pitch where the club has been enjoying success in recent times.

Out with the old

In both football and IT, when things are not working, they need changing. For the latter, the cost of not making alterations to the infrastructure can prove disastrous. Fortunately for Pendlebury and his small team, the problems were noted and suitably addressed in time.

The area that the IT manager was experiencing problems with was the local area network (LAN) and Ethernet switches in particular. Around a year and a half ago, the club had switches from a variety of vendors, meaning there was no standard across the board and the IT team was “very limited” with what they could do, Pendlebury explained.

The switches in place were not capable of delivering the technologies that the organisation wanted to help improve performance, benefit customers and reduce costs.

Pendlebury was also seeing increasing demand for LAN bandwidth from the ticket turnstiles, television networks as well as media commentators.

Both the capacity and resiliency of the network had to be enhanced so that match days, when traffic is significantly higher, went smoothly. Video and data traffic crossing the LAN needed to be prioritised as well so that visiting media companies were given a top service.

And it was not just Craven Cottage that needed attention, as the Cottagers' training facilities required an improved network infrastructure as well.

In with the new

It was for these reasons that Pendlebury and his team decided to bring in a new LAN infrastructure deployment using Juniper Networks EX3200 and EX4200 Series Ethernet Switches.

“We went to tender, we ended up with two vendors, with Juniper being one of them. We chose Juniper due to the switch specifications, [which offered] more than anyone else,” Pendlebury explained. He also pointed to the power consumption of the switches, which the IT manager said were lower than anything else on the market at the time.

“A key driver for me was the single Junos operating system across all the different switches we have, whereas the other vendor had three different operating systems for their solution. So, it is a lot easier for myself to manage the things that we do manage.”

Pendlebury also called on Scalable Communications, Juniper’s preferred partner and a convergence solutions provider, to help implement the new infrastructure. The tech was rolled out at both the training facilities and the ground in just two days.

Results on and off the pitch

Following the introduction of these services, the IT operations at Fulham have been especially fluid, much like the team’s smooth passing game on the pitch.

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