Lumen Technologies has been tasked with providing fiber to connect the New York Yankees' primary data center in Tampa, Florida.

Despite being based more than 1,100 miles away in New York, Major League Baseball giants New York Yankees began the process of relocating their primary data center from Yankee Stadium to a new, purpose-built Tampa facility back in 2019.

The facility, which opened in 2022, features a 325 square meter-data floor and is built to withstand sustained winds of 200 miles per hour.

Lumen's programmable network links Yankee Stadium to the Tampa facility. Lumen connects the Tampa data center to Yankee Stadium over two separate 100-gigabit fiber paths, one routed through New York and one through New Jersey, with both terminating in Tampa.

According to Lumen, one path carries the live traffic, while the other stays on standby, taking over automatically without data loss if the first is disrupted.

The two paths are thus independent, meaning that the stadium will always remain connected between New York and Tampa.

"With automatic failover, we can lose our entire central office and still maintain connectivity to the Tampa data center," said Erron Pettry, senior manager of data center facilities operations for the New York Yankees. “The Yankees cannot go offline, and having Lumen’s infrastructure safeguards our operations."

Lumen noted that its network can be utilized as demand for the network increases on matchdays, where more than 50,000 can often be in attendance at Yankee Stadium.

The technology company's network-as-a-service (NaaS) means that the Yankees are able "to add or shed capacity as needed by the event and pay only for what they use, freeing budget for other priorities."

The partnership between Lumen and New York Yankees also focuses on adding additional capacity for cloud and AI services.

"AI is a new and exciting frontier, and our new Tampa facility provides us with room to grow into emerging cloud and AI services," said Mike Lane, senior vice president of technology and broadcasting and chief information officer for the New York Yankees.

“We partnered with Lumen to feel secure that our network can keep an immense volume of data moving whenever and wherever the organization needs it to go."