International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) (NYSE: IBM) today announced a renewed marketing and services partnership with the National Football League (NFL). As part of the agreement, IBM, which has been an NFL sponsor since 2003, will continue providing consulting expertise and IT solutions to the NFL in an effort to more efficiently manage the IT infrastructure and data storage.

As the NFL looks to improve upon its current data center, IBM will help to reduce costs and energy consumption all while increasing power and cooling capacity.

The first phase will include an initiative to shift the NFL's IT Shared Services environment to a dynamic infrastructure by delivering a number of operational improvements. IBM will provide design and construction services for an upgraded data center facility located in Mt. Laurel, New Jersey. These services will allow the NFL to improve scalability and capacity all while reducing daily operating costs and improving the overall energy efficiency for the NFL.

"With IBM's help, our IT infrastructure can become more energy efficient, cost effective and adaptive with how we manage our IT services and data," said Nancy Galietti, Vice President of Information Technology from the NFL. "IBM understands our needs from a business and IT perspective and we look forward to working together on this journey to deliver a dynamic infrastructure."

As part of the initiative, the upgraded data center facility will create efficiencies and allow the NFL to take advantage of newer, faster and less expensive technologies. The upgraded facility will:

• Improve resiliency by minimizing single points of failure
  
• Add the capability to install high density computing and offer more computing power in less space.
  

IBM also plans to accelerate the server virtualization of existing IT Shared Services hardware in New York, New Jersey, and Los Angeles to improve operational consistency and increase availability.

"The NFL is a great partner, and we believe that this initiative will enable their business growth," said Rick Singer, Vice President, Client Executive Marketing, IBM. "Our goal is to provide the NFL with opportunities to offer premium services to its business divisions and clients."

In addition, IBM will deliver a plan to optimize the NFL's storage environment that can reduce the overall cost of storage hardware through virtualized storage provisioning.

As is critical with any business, IBM will provide the NFL with the design and implementation plan for a highly resilient solution architecture to meet the operational availability and disaster recovery requirements of the NFL business.

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Over the past 48 years, IBM has extended its business solutions into entertainment and professional sports by providing results and competition management systems. Today, IBM provides technology support and solutions to major sports and entertainment properties, including the Australian Open, Roland Garros, Wimbledon and U.S. Open Tennis championships, the Masters, the NFL and Tony Awards.

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