LONDON – Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) expanded its partnership with Tottenham Hotspur Football Club, including a virtualization shift away from VMware and a strong use case for the burgeoning Wi-Fi 7 standard.
Also known as Spurs, the British soccer club owns Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, London's largest club ground and the third-largest soccer stadium in England. HPE is the official hybrid cloud and IT enterprise networking partner, with its wares underpinning connectivity, operations, and infrastructure at the stadium, including hybrid cloud provisioning through HPE GreenLake.
As SDxCentral learned on a guided tour of the stadium, HPE has been Spurs’ networking partner of choice since the stadium first opened in 2019. Eight years on, the Premier League team has opted for a network refresh including HPE ProLiant Compute Gen12 servers to keep pace with its growing operations and drive down power usage as managed through the HPE Aruba Central platform.
"Our newer generation servers are between 20- and 30-times more effective than the ones we have today," Tottenham CTO Rob Pickering explained. "And our ability to use things like AI operations to manage the radios and the 1,800 access points we have, as well as all the switches we have, means that we can reduce our power usage and our CO2 emissions by over 30% over the generation. So we're benchmarking that at the moment as we put the new equipment in and take the old equipment out."
HPE ProLiant servers and Alletra Storage MP are part of the network refresh, helping to consolidate distributed environments from eight locations into two core environments. These power security, and internet protocol TV (IPTV), point-of-sale systems, crowd analytics, and AI-driven spectator services such as robotic fan cams.
The club’s lean IT team is also banking on HPE OpsRamp Software to manage the stadium’s complex, multisite environment more efficiently while reducing operational overhead.
'Cheerio, cheerio, cheerio' to Broadcom
Pickering and team also opted to replace the venue's long-running VMware instance with HPE VM Essentials (VME) as powered by HPE’s Morpheus Software. When asked whether Spurs were already heading toward Morpheus as part of its HPE expansion, Pickering told this title: “It doesn’t take a weatherman to tell which way the wind's blowing.”
“From a timing perspective, we're at the right time of our replacement cycles to be looking at those decision points,” Pickering continued. “For at least as long as my career in technology, hypervisor has been one of those very unsexy things that you bought from one person and you just sort of got on with it. And you know, with VMware, a 400-pound gorilla in that space, they took some decisions that I think run counter to both the system integrator side and the customer side.”
Spurs’ CTO described VME as being offered at a “very tasteful” price, while stressing cost wasn’t the main driver.
“Its ability to do things on behalf of the hardware far outstrips what VMware can do on that front. So in many ways, it's more capable," Pickering said.
Matt Harris, SVP and MD for HPE's United Kingdon, Ireland, Middle East, and Africa (UKIMEA) geographies, went a step further by suggesting that Spurs’ renewed contract has already paid for itself with the “huge cost saving of removing VMware licenses.”
Tottenham Hotspur Stadium: going '6-7' with HPE
Tottenham Hotspur Stadium boasts impressive metrics. For example, the venue can host almost 63,000 visitors for its regular matches, concerts, and events, with nearly two million guests per annum.
"Network access points" reach the 20,000 mark, with 700 Bluetooth beacons, almost 1,850 IPTV screens, and more than 500 CCTV cameras in operation. Spurs’ stadium also hosts more than 1,650 Wi-Fi access points, including 842 under-seat access points.
While logging into the free Wi-Fi marks an extra step compared to using one’s celluar carrier signal, Pickering revealed that 30,000 people connect to the stadium Wi-Fi at any given time, representing up to 50% penetration and rarely dropping below 15,000 users.
“Compared to 5G, it is better, and we certainly know that it's faster,” the CTO explained, adding that Wi-Fi underpins all operations throughout the stadium, hence its current investment in Wi-Fi 7. Besides Spurs, the nascent standard has also received the thumbs up from the New Nissan Stadium recently kitted out by Extreme Networks.
“We're one of the first stadiums in the world with Wi-Fi 7, if not the first," Pickering claimed of the soon-to-launch capability. "From a technology perspective, we'll be capable of doing that in the next month or so.”
That update is expected to bring “significantly more bandwidth” than with its current Wi-Fi 6 setup, including denser coverage in different locations around the stadium.
“It gives you a slightly different range, but more bandwidth is the heart of what we do. And when you have the demands that we see from our hirers, from football, from our fans going up exponentially, our ability to respond to that requires layers in technology," Pickering said.
Those layers don’t yet include a private 5G or 5G standalone (5G SA) component of the sort offered in London's Wembley mega-stadium, or in Major League Baseball events courtesy of T-Mobile US. Pickering put this down to a lack of a campus environment to push private signals across wide open spaces.
“We looked at it in places like our training ground where it would make a little bit more sense, but because we'd already cabled a lot of those spaces when we built those environments … connectivity was already in full operation and that made [other options] less attractive to us than they would otherwise because we already had the structure in place," Pickering explained.
Juniper in the Mist
Speaking with both HPE and Spurs, it’s clear Tottenham Hotspur Stadium stands out as a unique customer example with HPE providing services across the board in tandem with the design and expansion of the technology estate.
In fact, the one thing missing so far among other additions – such as security services and life cycle management via HPE Financial Services – is Juniper Networks integration.
Pickering appreciated HPE’s ongoing convergence of its recently acquired Juniper Networks wares with the main product line, adding that welcoming products like Mist into its current Aruba-centric fold was “something that we're looking forward to taking advantage of over the next three or five years.”