The Kraft Group is in the process of working with Dell Technologies to renovate its internal IT infrastructure that powers Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, and its other operating companies spread across various manufacturing and shipping verticals. This work allows the enterprise to manage and share vast amounts of data across cloud and on-premises locations.

Most of this effort is housed within the 22-year-old stadium made famous by its main tenant the New England Patriots. However, that location is most often used for concert events and large gatherings, while Kraft Group’s manufacturing businesses operate around the clock.

“So based on my day, my hat will change from dealing with customs forms to dealing with getting 50,000 people tonight into the stadium for a preseason game,” Kraft Group CIO Michael Israel recently told SDxCentral in an interview.

The group is headquartered at the stadium, which provides ample space to house the equipment needed to power its operations, Israel said.

Dell provides the compute, storage, and analytics. This includes Dell endpoints, VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), PowerScale storage, and virtualized PowerEdge servers with VMware.

“One-hundred-percent of our server environment is virtualized at this point,” Israel explained. “The only time where we have very specific cases of being un-virtualized from a server perspective is where we need heavy NVIDIA GPUs, etc. On this audio processing, we're on a Dell PowerEdge server as opposed to a VxRail because of those GPU requirements.”

Israel also explained that the group’s manufacturing and campus locations run disaster recovery backups onsite at the stadium using Dell’s VxBlock system.

That DR system is important at the stadium for Kraft to provide service level agreements (SLAs) to allow onsite partners, but Israel noted it takes on greater importance in dealing with the group’s broader operations.

“Our manufacturing plants are operating 7/24, so if we have an outage, and we have to flip, that's something that if you're not operating on a Tuesday in July, the revenue clock is ticking,” Israel said.

Dell helped with initial set up of the systems, but Israel’s onsite team handles the day-to-day operations, relying on the VMware components for monitoring and storage management.

All of this equipment backs a WiFi6-based network with antennas and hardware provided by Extreme Networks and Verizon as a cellular partner. And that network pumps in a significant amount of data into the onsite analytics platform.

"With WiFi6 in, at maximum we've had over 45,000 guests simultaneously pushing 22 gigs of traffic," Israel said. "We know from that side the guest experience is rock solid when it comes to WiFi."

Israel explained that the analytics allow Kraft to look at how long people are on the WiFi network, what they are doing on the network, and where they are going when on the network. The system can also track where products are in the stadium to gauge expected delivery times to different parts of the stadium.

“We have a mobile application that can move product to a cart like an Amazon delivery and monitor where it is. Did it get dropped off? Did it get intercepted? Because what will happen is you have someone bringing 20 cases of water up to our 100 level and a manager may say, hey, bring it here instead, that's more important,” Israel said. “As soon as that happens in a manual basis, you lose track of your inventory. We now have it on a mobile platform that's sitting here on site where, OK, I was supposed to bring it here, I just changed it on my phone from here to here, so now we have active updates to our inventories.”

Israel explained that the stadium’s previous “antiquated” system basically only provided an end-of-day synopsis of what happened. It can now provide real-time analysis that allows for proactive re-stocking of specific items at specific vending locations based on expected sales tied to the event’s progress.

“If you're running low on pizza and it's prior to halftime, you're going to want to restock, that's important,” Israel said. “But since we stop selling beer at the end of the third quarter and you're getting a notice that beer is running low, those are alerts that you're not even telling people about because that's going to be a restocking issue, not something that somebody is going to do something about if it’s in the fourth quarter of the game.”

The Kraft Group also relies on Dell to provide security for these use cases and back-end operations. The organization’s cybersecurity posture is based on Dell’s Secureworks extended detection and response (XDR) platform, Israel said, adding that he spends about 30% of his day on security.

“With manufacturing facilities, with industrial systems, you're looking at areas today that you would not have thought about five or six years ago,” Israel said. “You're looking at and saying, OK, how does a [heating, ventilation, and air conditioning] system connect in? Even though it's not connected to an IT network, it's connected to something. So we're spending a lot of time this year on those systems that in theory don't report up to me but they're connected in, and if something goes wrong I'm still gonna get yelled at, so I better understand that.”

Fortunately, Israel noted that the extensive coverage of cybersecurity events has made it easier to educate people about the importance of network security and avoiding costly ransomware attacks. And the more robust security platforms make it easier to implement needed protection.

“Even something as simple as [data loss prevention] scanning, preventing folks from sending and receiving information that is deemed risky, we couldn't have done that five or six years ago,” Israel said. “Now, it's what else can we do to protect your organization?”

UPDATED: This story has been updated to clarify that The Kraft Group is now using Dell's PowerScale storage platform.