Phillies network is hard-hitting and error-free - Philadelphia Phillies use local area network for automated ticketing system

Communications News, Nov, 1993 by Curt Harler

About the only thing as hot as the Philadelphia Phillies baseball team is the network which provides their ticket sales, administrative and management support.

Bob Ford, the Phillies' network administrator, was looking for a more reliable, cost-effective system that would allow high-speed connectivity to and from State College, Pa., (located in the center of the state) and Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia, in the far southeastern corner of the state.

Six MIS personnel, including Ford, are based at State College. They support the computer based ticket sales

team, assembling, testing and debugging systems. In addition, they support ticket sales for the National Football League Philadelphia Eagles, the National Basketball Association's 76ers...even the Philly Zoo.

Five more people at the 62,586-seat Veterans Stadium provide basic support for the computer operations.

The computing environment is a Unix network for development tasks and 15 DOS machines and a minicomputer used as the primary database for statistics, public relations and customer records.

"We have a LAN (local area network) of 386s and 486s, several of which have one to two gigs of disk space," Ford says. "All are running Unix so we can really load up the network."

Ticket sales operations are run on a Data General MV 9600. There are 200 users on the mini in Philadelphia. The accounting department is the only user on the other mini.

While the Phillies needed the link between State College and Philadelphia, long-distance toll charges were eating away at the budget. The link cost the Phillies an average of $400 a month in toll charges. They put a Micom Marathon fast packet multiplexer on the network and were able to piggy-back data and voice while speeding up the State College-Philadelphia connection rate from 2,400 b/s to 56 kb/s.

"Our 56 kb/s data link is good, but the voice is not of the quality that we want it to be," Ford says. They have changed to E&M trunks, which improved the tinny echo which occurred from time to time on the 56 kb/s line.

Service is provided on E&M tie lines over MCI. "Voice quality is satisfactory, but not top quality," Ford explains.

The link allows the State College office, which provides high-level network support for the entire operation, to log-on to the system at the stadium.

The heart of the minicomputer system is a PL1 ticket sales database with an AOS-VS operating system. Everything for the future system is being done in C-language and is compiled for the Unix box. The main develpment system in State College has a DX 266 processor with 64 Megs of main memory. There is also a 16-Meg disk caching controller and 2 GB of SCSI disk.

The Phillies are committed to move out of the mini computer environment. Current plans call for upper-end machines, probably Pentium-based, to run Unix. There will be a file server with the database behind a front-end unit with the sales and ticketing data processing responsibility.

The Phillies started off playing .725 ball this year and ended up National League Champions. Ticket demand skyrocketed. "The network was doing fine, but it sure put a strain on the people," Ford says.

Other departments, like public relations, operate on PCs running DOS over Ethernet.

Ford and Bill Dripps, manager of software development/telecomm, were impressed with the potential for high reliability and fast performance of the SunSoft Interactive Unix system, a 32-bit operating environment.

One of the major advantages Ford sees from modifying the existing system is network redundancy.

The network will continue to support DOS because the administrative department has several specialized DOS applications it can't walk away from. These programs will be placed on a Unix server which should provide those departments faster access.

"People have autonomy at their local system, but they don't have to worry about backup," Ford says.