ClusterControl enables high availability for football data & video platform

Severalnines powers football video and data platform Wyscout used by Real Madrid, Arsenal, Juventus & many more.

Industry Stream Video

Technologies Galera, MySQL

Products ClusterControl

Background

Wyscout is the world’s leading company providing video, data, and technology to football people all over the world. The platform helps clubs prepare for their next match and allows
scouts to make informed purchasing decisions based on player performance. The platform is used by the world’s biggest clubs including, Arsenal, Juventus, and Real Madrid.

Italy-based Wyscout founded in 2004 evolved into the platform it is today, not only hosting
crucial matchday data but also providing a portal for clubs to arrange transfers and trials for prospective players through its community of over 35,000 professionals.

Challenge

Wyscout matured from a successful startup to a professional organization, which has high-profile customers around the world, enhancing not only the product but customer care, marketing, and sales. With this evolution, the infrastructure had to be improved to cope with the growing size of the database, which stands at half a terabyte to date. To help address this challenge, Wyscout needed a reliable, scalable, and fast database in place.

The majority of our business is online, we are extremely reliant on the infrastructure our business proposition is built upon. It was crucial that we had a system in place to efficiently manage our databases.
Francesco Nassano, SysAdmin for Wyscout

Solution

To achieve more agility, it was decided that the database infrastructure would be deployed and managed by Severalnines’ ClusterControl platform in a cloud environment.

The migration to the cloud, which consisted of a MySQL Galera Cluster, was conducted using ClusterControl. Several other solutions were evaluated including AWS Aurora and MemSQL, but the need for a highly available service with advanced management capabilities was critical. The system needed to be easily managed, and have high performance, especially during spikes in-game time. It took the team at Wyscout two months to migrate and implement the technology end-to-end. The new database cluster incurred some pre-planned costs, but that was mitigated when database performance increased by 30% despite the increased workload of 15% coming from new customers.

Outcome

Wyscout’s enhanced online presence helped its entrance into the eCommerce game, as it looked to sell its products to customers online. It also has plans to make commercial use of all the player statistics it has, which is based on tagged events, such as a player making a tackle at a specific time, in football matches. This new product, which is based on the core of the business, is wholly reliant on a solid and scalable database that can handle Francesco Nassano, SysAdmin both OLTP and OLAP-type workloads.

ClusterControl allowed us to implement a high availability database cluster and easily operate it, which helped the biggest teams in the world access player data anytime, anywhere. Severalnines technology was so easy to use we were able to implement it ourselves.
Francesco Nassano, SysAdmin for Wyscout

Francesco Nassano, Wyscout Sysadmin said, “The majority of our business is online, we are
extremely reliant on the infrastructure our business proposition is built upon. It was crucial
that we had a system in place to efficiently manage our databases. ClusterControl allowed
us to implement a high availability database cluster and easily operate it, which helped the
biggest teams in the world access player data anytime, anywhere. Severalnines technology
was so easy to use we were able to implement it ourselves.”

Vinay Joosery, Severalnines’ CEO, added, “I’m a massive football fan and I always wonder how tech is going to improve this billion-dollar, global sport. The natural abilities on the pitch won’t change much, but the way teams prepare for their next opponent can make or break a season. It makes me happy that Severalnines is thus integral to the performance of
some of the world’s biggest football teams.”

Summary

MySQL Galera Cluster expertise

Severalnines delivered a combination of MySQL Galera Cluster experience, a scalable management system, and top-notch support.

Increased performance by 30%

The new database cluster deployed and managed by ClusterControl increased database performance by 30% despite a 15% increase in workload from new customers.