The Texas stadium that will host this year’s Super Bowl – the championship game of the American National Football League – has revamped its data center and fitted it out with HP’s hardware.

HP provided its Converged Infrastructure solution to the Dallas Cowboys stadium. The environment supports more than 3,000 video screens – showing games and advertisements – all electronic ticket scanners, concessions sales and electronic menus.

Pete Walsh, the Dallas Cowboys’ IT director, said the HP system has already helped the stadium increase revenue.

"From the merchandising and concession system to the handheld wireless ticket scanning application, everything in this new building is tied to technology," he said.

The HP environment installed at the franchise’s data center is based on the company’s BladeSystem architecture. The set-up enabled a footprint reduction from 500 rack-mounted servers to 250 blades.

Operators manage the system – both physical and virtual servers – using HP Virtual Connect modules. This is HP’s solution that enables a converged fabric-like network for connecting physical and virtual machines to LAN and SAN.

The storage set-up includes HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Arrays.

Infrastructure resources and applications are provisioned using HP BladeSystem Matrix, the vendor’s solution for management of converged systems that deliver shared services.

The stadium will host Super Bowl XLV on 6 February. In addition to football games, the arena hosts concerts, conferences and other sporting events.