International Speedway Corporation (ISC)

Motorsports Promoter Increases Availability, Cuts Costs with Sun Managed Services

Based in Daytona Beach, Florida, International Speedway Corporation (ISC) is a leading promoter of NASCAR and other motorsports. The company operates 13 premier racing facilities including the Daytona International Speedway and Talladega Superspeedway. ISC also operates MRN Radio — the nation’s largest sports radio network — and Americrown Service Corporation, a company that provides food and merchandise. In 2008, ISC earned $787 million in revenue; it currently employs 1,000 people.

Customer Challenges

Boost service-level availability
Increase IT productivity
Reduce costs

Solution

ISC engaged Sun Remote Operations Management, an offering from Sun Managed Services, to monitor and manage its mission-critical systems 24x7, and to provide services such as code promotion, patch management, and third-party vendor management. Sun consultants also helped ISC restructure its architecture, which includes clustered servers, virtualization, and a storage area network.

Business Results

Increased service-level availability to 99.9%
Boosted IT productivity
Delivered consistent system performance
Reduced administrative expenses
Provided real-time insight into systems

Products and Services

Story Details

Speed and performance are what International Speedway Corporation (ISC) is all about. The company manages about 66 motorsports activities at its facilities each year, including the Daytona 500, Sprint Cup Series, Nationwide Cup Series and Camping World Truck Series. For each event, ISC sells about 100,000 tickets and hundreds of thousands of souvenirs and concessions. To facilitate its event-focused sales and marketing activities, ISC relies on IT from multiple vendors to support a ticketing system, retail system, 54 interactive web sites and an ERP system.

Until 2006, a third-party vendor hosted these systems. However, after several years of 10–15% growth, ISC started to experience availability issues and end users experienced inconsistent levels of system performance. The hosting provider lacked the expertise and standardized processes to scale the environment and rapidly detect and remedy issues. As a result, the IT department at ISC had to divert its attention from developing strategic initiatives to resolving system issues. Their efforts were impeded because ISC lacked direct access to its systems. Over time, the hit to IT productivity was apparent, and these challenges created unexpected costs and frustration for employees and customers. ISC decided it was time either to switch hosting providers or to take over its own IT systems.

" Everything we have hoped for in a relationship with a managed services provider has come to fruition. Sun Managed Services really does an outstanding job. "

— Craig Neeb, Chief Information Officer, International Speedway Corporation

After consulting with a third party, ISC chose to build its own datacenter and engage a company to remotely manage its mission-critical systems. ISC sent an RFP to numerous vendors including Sun, Savvis, and Kanbay. “We didn’t have an enormous budget to deal with, so we had to be really selective,” notes Craig Neeb, Chief Information Officer at ISC. “I didn’t want to be a small fish in a big pond. I had to feel that the company was really interested in our business and had an organizational structure that could align well with our business goals and objectives.” Ultimately, ISC chose Sun Remote Operations Management, an offering from Sun Managed Services. Sun offered in-depth expertise in numerous technologies, detailed problem-resolution policies, and comprehensive services, including change and event management, clustering, third-party vendor management, and code promotion (to migrate new applications from test environments into production). In addition, Sun provided a portal that ISC could use to access its systems and obtain detailed analytical reports.

Throughout 2007, Sun personnel worked with ISC to restructure its architecture and set up the new datacenter. All three mission-critical systems include a mix of old and new technologies that run on the Solaris 10 Operating System. The ticketing system, which includes an application tier of three Sun Fire T2000 servers running 18 virtual environments and a clustered database tier of two Sun Fire V490 servers and two Sun Fire T2000 servers, makes use of Solaris Cluster 3.2 software, Oracle Real Application Clusters, and Oracle Database 10g. To speed performance, the ticketing system interoperates with a multi-tiered storage area network (SAN) built with Sun Storage Archive Manager software 4.6, two Sun StorageTek 6540 arrays, and one Sun StorEdge 6130 array. The ERP system runs on two clustered Sun Fire V490 servers along with Oracle PeopleSoft Enterprise applications and Oracle Database 10g. The company’s Web sites, which connect to the ticketing system and SAN, run in multiple virtual and physical environments built with with 4 Microsoft Windows servers, driven by both Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle 10g databases.

As a result of its engagement with Sun Remote Operations Management, IT employees at ISC are more productive and can focus on strategic technology initiatives rather than issues. “Sun Managed Services really operates as an extension of our team,” says Neeb. “We work extremely well together. Sun’s Control Point portal is great. I get a report every day of what is going on in our environment. We’ve reduced our administrative costs for third-party services, and Sun assists us in addressing our future needs as well.”

The redesigned architecture supports varying levels of system traffic better, and Sun Managed Services provides the expertise and processes to consistently exceed its service-level agreements for performance and availability. “Last year was our best year for service levels,” says Neeb. “We hit 99.9%. Sun Managed Services exceeded our expectations. They are always two steps ahead of us. There have been many times where Sun personnel found a problem before it affected the end user’s experience. Sun then resolved it and let us know what happened. That’s my dream world right there. That’s what I was looking for.”