Calling the right plays with intelligent data

The San Francisco 49ers are one of the most storied franchises in NFL history, beloved by millions of fans worldwide. Based in the California Bay Area, the 49ers are known not only for their championship pedigree but also for embracing technology to enhance team performance and fan engagement.

Levi’s^® Stadium, home to the 49ers, is a state-of-the-art venue that opened in 2014 with advanced tech features and continues to evolve as a premier sports and entertainment destination.

The 49ers faced a complex challenge managing around 6 petabytes of NAS unstructured data, including home directories, video content, and massive image libraries.

Utilizing multiple systems, they found they were being constrained by aging data center infrastructure and needed an easy, efficient way to consolidate vast unstructured datasets while supporting their stadium innovation projects and ensuring high availability and disaster recovery for critical game-day operations and archives.

Seeking a partner that could offer not only cutting-edge technology but also deep collaboration and trust, the 49ers built their winning digital playbook on a highly reliable, active/active infrastructure from NetApp, keeping performance and availability at a championship level through two clusters continuously replicating to each other.

Leveraging the NetApp Keystone^® storage-as-a-service model, the 49ers now benefit from enterprise-class, all-flash storage that supports fast data access and intelligent management. This solution powers high-resolution jumbotron feeds, real-time data analytics for game-day operations, department shares, home directories, historical video archives, and an expanding photo library. NetApp demonstrated that it could provide the scalability, reliability, and security required for such an important project, supporting the 49ers in creating a seamless, data-driven fan experience and an agile operational backbone for football and stadium management.

While the partnership and technology deployment are still in progress, early benefits are already visible across the organization. On game days, real-time monitoring systems powered by NetApp enable staff to track food and beverage sales to restock stands proactively, ensuring that fans never miss a moment of the game due to supply shortages.

The 49ers app leverages data insights to recommend parking and deliver flash deals linked to game events, such as favorite player touchdowns, enhancing fan excitement and engagement.

NetApp supports the continuous streaming of high-resolution video content to jumbotrons and kiosks, delivering crisp 60 frames-per-second visuals for fans throughout the stadium. Data replication and disaster recovery are designed with resilience in mind, featuring a DR copy that is 50% larger than the primary and ensuring no data loss for archival material that spans decades.

Beyond game day, the NetApp system-powered infrastructure secures department shares, studio workflows, and historical video assets, enabling faster access and collaboration. Some photo archives are online, with ongoing digitization efforts to enhance accessibility.

The 49ers plan to deepen their data integration with applications, which coaches use for multi-angle game film analysis. Though the organization is already leveraging Microsoft Azure and AWS, a cloud backup solution for this project has grown in priority. This is because none of the game films dating back to the 1970s have ever been deleted.

Video surveillance data, required to be retained for 42 days, also benefits from NetApp’s secure and scalable infrastructure, supporting compliance and operational needs. With key enterprise applications like SAP running in Azure, the 49ers’ hybrid cloud strategy leverages NetApp solutions across primary, DR, and cloud backup environments.

The ongoing collaboration between the 49ers and NetApp embodies a shared vision: an intelligent, secure, and seamless data environment that supports innovation on and off the field, improves fan experience, and drives operational excellence.