West Ham United Football Club Case Study

COMPANY BACKGROUND

West Ham United Football Club is an English professional
football club based in Stratford, East London. They compete
in the Premier League, the top tier of English football.
The club play at the London Stadium, having moved from
their former home the Boleyn Ground in 2016.

THE CHALLENGE

The WHU senior stakeholders discussed in length how the business was covered
in the event of a crisis and how IT would help support the business. It was decided
that WHU were to invest in infrastructure that would ensure that the business
would continue to work in the event of any crisis that may arise.
West Ham IT were facing daily challenges with legacy infrastructure causing
downtime on a weekly basis. The legacy infrastructure was complex to manage
involving having to look after multiple different systems.

INDUSTRY
• Sports hospitality industry

THE SOLUTION

West Ham United legacy infrastructure was at complex, difficult to manage with no scalability. West Ham’s IT team were spending countless hours updating and managing multiple systems. WHU IT looked for a solution that would provide the business with

• Business Continuity
• Simplified Infrastructure
• A cost-effective IT infrastructure
• Scalability
• Increased performance

The WHU senior stakeholders discussed in length how the business was covered in the event of a crisis and how IT would help support the business. It was decided that WHU were to invest in infrastructure that would ensure that the business would continue to work in the event of any crisis that may arise.

West Ham IT was facing daily challenges with legacy infrastructure causing downtime on a weekly basis. The legacy infrastructure was complex to manage involving having to look after multiple different systems.

WHU IT looked at multiple hyper-converged infrastructures across multiple different hypervisors. Nutanix provided WHU with a solution that would consolidate a file server and Hypervisor in one easily manageable place.

WHU currently use the following services:

• AHV
• Prism Pro
• AFS
• Move/Xtract

Xtract allowed for WHU IT to move all VM’s quickly and easily from a Hyper-V environment to Nutanix’s native Acropolis hypervisor. Prism allowed WHU IT to manage all infrastructure and services on the Acropolis hypervisor from a simple web interface.

VANQUISH TECH & WEST HAM UNITED

Vanquish Tech and WHU have been working together since early 2018 helping West Ham deliver various IT projects.

Vanquish Tech held multiple discussions with WHU IT to help scope out the new infrastructure and identifying Nutanix as the successor for all their infrastructure needs.

At the heart of the soul of London since 1895 West Ham United is a dynamic, fan-focused football Club constantly moving forward but always with an eye on the past.

Our home at the London Stadium has a capacity of 60,000 making it one of the biggest club stadia in the country however our tickets are the lowest priced for London-based clubs in the Premier League, echoing objectives to create Affordable Family Football.

Working in the professional sports industry provides unique challenges on a daily basis but powered by Nutanix with the support of Vanquish Tech these challenges are easily handled.

Nutanix support has helped WHU IT all the way from the start. Supporting West Ham with the initial scoping, the physical installation of the Nutanix infrastructure and day-to-day issues that may occur.

With Nutanix West Ham are looking to scale its operations out looking to put services into the public cloud. Going forward West Ham are looking to implement more Nutanix services including NearSync and Frame.