The professional American football team Arizona Cardinals uses Dell servers and storage products as the core of its on-premises IT infrastructure, with AI on its roadmap.
The Cardinals are based in Phoenix, and their stadium holds 65,000 fans. Starting in 2005, systems integrator Insight North America built an IT setup with a data, voice and video IP network covering the stadium and satellite facilities. The deployment included over 1,000 Cisco IP phones and video conferencing units, 700 stadium advertising plasma screens, plus hundreds of IBM PCs and servers.
Erik Jones became the Cardinals’ VP of information technology in July 2023 after predecessor Mark Feller retired. Jones inherited the existing on-premises IT environment and a multi-year, multi-million-dollar partnership between the team and Cox Business established in 2017. This arrangement extended prior services; Cox replaced CDW, which had supplied stadium Wi‑Fi and networking gear. Cox became the exclusive technology provider for the team and University of Phoenix Stadium, delivering Cisco-based telecom, internet, cable TV, video transmission, Wi‑Fi and network infrastructure.
Jones found the legacy IT stack strained, marked by slow processing, high latency, and support staff swamped by infrastructure issues, poor performance and trouble tickets.
He modernized the Cardinals’ IT infrastructure in collaboration with Dell partner IMT. Before joining the Cardinals, Jones served as VP of Technology for the Seattle Kraken ice hockey team, where he worked with IMT on AWS-powered sports and media asset management. IMT is a Dell Titanium partner and has built a Dell IT stack for the football team and its Hard Rock Stadium starting in 2021, making it well positioned to support the Cardinals’ IT refresh.
The Cardinals now deploy Dell server and storage gear for back-office IT, game-day video processing, scouting analytics, data protection and cyber-resiliency:
PowerEdge R-Series servers run workloads including scouting analytics;
PowerScale AI Data Platform file storage centralizes and accelerates large media workflows, giving media teams low-latency file performance to capture, edit and share game-day content in real time;
PowerStore delivers unified all-flash primary storage for finance, business intelligence and daily operations, replacing legacy systems lacking stability and scale;
PowerProtect Data Domain appliances and PowerProtect Data Manager supply backup storage for fan data from ticketing, retail and digital platforms;
PowerProtect Cyber Recovery with Cyber Detect protects critical data via an isolated, intelligent recovery environment.
Jones says old infrastructure pain points are resolved: “The things that used to keep us up at night have been resolved.”
The Cardinals’ media team captures and processes hundreds of terabytes of game-day video for social media, broadcasts and fan engagement. This video work is time-sensitive. Jones notes: “We’ve got roughly two to three hours to create a meaningful experience for 65,000-plus fans each gameday and live event.”
Internal scouting and football operations platforms, used by coaches and staff to review video and assess players, run up to 10x faster. Scouts and analysts instantly access game film, player data and insights. Jones’ team is exploring AI to streamline fan entry, improve retail and food service experiences, and extract deeper insights from terabytes of scouting footage and analytics. Facial recognition for faster entry and AI-enabled retail and food transactions are already in development.
Jones stated: “Without the infrastructure and the work we’ve done over the past year, none of the things we’re thinking about with AI would be possible … We are AI-prepared, which was a big core objective I outlined just three years ago."
Footnote
Cisco hardware supports the stadium’s high-density Wi‑Fi, core network, club communications and event security. A 2025 agreement adds AI-ready networking, high-density Wi‑Fi 7 and hybrid mesh firewall cybersecurity. IMT, together with Dell, provides the compute, video storage, data protection and resiliency stack.
Beijing Qianxing Jietong Technology Co., Ltd.
Sandy Yang/Global Strategy Director
WhatsApp / WeChat: +86 13426366826
Email: yangyd@qianxingdata.com
Website: www.qianxingdata.com/www.storagesserver.com
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