Background:
Baseball fans from around the world are flocking to MLB.com, the official Web site of Major League Baseball. With game attendance continuing to break records, baseball fans and casual site visitors alike can log onto MLB.com to check scores, watch game highlights, buy products and even manage a virtual team. What made this all possible is a collaboration between Major League Baseball Advanced Media (MLBAM) and Sun Microsystems. The goal? To build the most heavily trafficked Web site on the Internet. The result? The Internet's most successful Web portal devoted to professional sports, based on both the number of site visitors (more than 1 billion in 2004) and quantity of page views delivered (9 million during game seven of the 2004 American League playoffs). Sun collaborated with MLBAM to architect and build a rock-solid platform based on Sun servers, storage and software including the Java Enterprise System and Solaris. Why Sun? MLBAM knew that Sun's scalable, bullet-proof infrastructure would easily handle massive bursts of traffic without ever choking under pressure. Together with Sun Microsystems, MLBAM opened up baseball for the world, sharing every game, every at-bat and every pitch in rich media, live or archived, with all of baseball's hundreds of millions of fans.
"Throughout the process, from visioning through all stages of implementation, the Sun people felt like part of our organization. Thanks to these solutions, MLB.com is built on a next-generation IT infrastructure with reliability we can count on, and flexibility and scalability that will let us seamlessly grow and add features into the future, meeting and exceeding our fan's expectations."
—Justin Shaffer, Vice President and Chief Architect, Major League Baseball Advanced Media
