MotoGP motorcycle races stream to devices everywhere

Dorna Sports Sociedad Limitada is as dynamic as the business it is in: Championship motorcycle road racing. The company needed an IT environment flexible enough to accommodate the demand spikes around 18 major annual racing events — it found the answer in a virtual private cloud supplied by DXC Technology.

Flexible IT environment

Dorna Sports holds exclusive commercial and television rights for the motorcycling sport of MotoGP, the pinnacle of motorcycle racing and Dorna’s main source of revenue. Established in 1988 as an international sports management and marketing company, Dorna is headquartered in Madrid and has offices in Amsterdam, Barcelona, London and Tokyo. The company broadcasts MotoGP via major pay TV channels, a range of internet portals and its ever-expanding digital presence.

While the races attract more than 22 million in-person spectators each year, still more viewers take in the events online or on TV. These viewers benefit from the 100 cameras that capture real-time video at each race. Some of the cameras are trackside while others are mounted to the motorcycles themselves, and there are even aerial shots from a helicopter. Taken together, the video for each race generates 8TB of data.

This amount of data and the ultra-fast turnaround demands of media content require tremendous computing power. Instead of investing heavily in IT assets to handle peak loads 18 times per year, the company sought a more cost-effective alternative. The challenge, says Dorna Sports IT Director Jordi Sais, was to find “flexible infrastructure we can turn on and off and deploy when we need [it].”

The infrastructure also needed to be able to:

• Keep websites running at all times

• Manage television content, photographs, data and information

• Support a mobile service to enhance the event experience

• Offer timing data processing, communication and public relations services

And finally, the solution had to be reliable, flexible, scalable, more secure than the current environment, and able to reduce the total cost of ownership while minimizing the risk associated with change.

Racing to the answer

Ultimately, Dorna Sports chose a virtual private cloud from DXC hosted in a DXC data center in Barcelona. Some of the IT infrastructure is rack-mounted and client managed, while the rest is managed by DXC. Dorna IT staff handled the data migration to the cloud.

The end-to-end solution leverages innovation and prepares Dorna for growth by increasing IT agility, flexibility and efficiency. DXC helped Dorna transform its public web environments and internal IT to a secure and scalable model supported by the virtual private cloud. The solution, in place since December 2015, runs web-hosting workloads and supports a hybrid IT environment, making it possible to gradually shift other services to the cloud.

Today Dorna Sports broadcasts MotoGP events over the air and online, leveraging a state-of-the-art central infrastructure built by DXC. Dorna operates in an event-driven environment, and the cloud facilitates the handling of peak loads. Cloud services also improve the company’s fault tolerance and disaster recovery position, and Dorna is able to move skilled IT staff from hardware maintenance to tasks that serve the core business, such as keeping the media programming studio in top shape.

Taken together, the shift to the DXC virtual private cloud has resulted in a highly secure, flexible and scalable environment that allows Dorna to adjust IT to meet fluctuating business demands. It has also improved IT reliability, uptime and web performance. And Dorna now has the capacity necessary to host images, streaming and other high-bandwidth applications.

Dorna Sports likes the fact that it pays only for what it uses, and fans of MotoGP enjoy the fact that they get seamless, unfettered access to all the outstanding motorcycle racing content. That fan base, after all, is huge: 4.5 million Facebook fans, 675,000 Twitter followers, 477,000 Google+ fans, 435,000 YouTube subscribers and 78,000 Instagram followers.