NetApp INSIGHT 2025: The Enterprise Data Platform—Intelligent, Resilient, Disaggregated | Cesar Cernuda, NetApp & Aaron Amendolia, NFL

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Cesar Cernuda

President

NetApp

Aaron Amendolia

Deputy CIO

NFL

play_circle_outline NetApp and NFL: 20 Years of Trust Driving Data Infrastructure Enhancements for Elevated Fan Engagement

play_circle_outline Integration of multiple technology partners for comprehensive ecosystem support and performance.

play_circle_outline Emerging technology adaptability and its importance for operational efficiency and innovation.

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Cesar Cernuda, NetApp & Aaron Amendolia, NFL

Cesar Cernuda

President NetApp

Aaron Amendolia

Deputy CIO NFL

In this NetApp INSIGHT 2025 segment from Las Vegas, theCUBE’s Christophe Bertrand sits down with César Cernuda, president of NetApp, and Aaron Amendolia, deputy chief information officer of the NFL, to unpack a 20-year, trust-built partnership powering the league’s high-performance operations and global fan experience. Amendolia details the massive scale of game-day data – a stadium ring of 32 cameras (six in 8K, the rest in 4K) generating ~1.4TB of video per game and roughly half a petabyte per season – plus player sensors and rich metadata that feed officia... Read more

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Christophe Bertrand

>> Welcome back to Las Vegas. We're live here at NetApp INSIGHT 2025. Very, very pleased to be joined by two great speakers. We have Cesar Cernuda, the president of NetApp, real pleasure to have you, and everyone wants to talk to. Aaron Amendolia, I pronounced it correctly. And you are the Deputy CIO of the NFL. So we had the 49ers earlier, so now we get the full loop.

Aaron Amendolia

>> You got the league here now.

Christophe Bertrand

>> We got the full league now. Okay. So I may have to ask some prediction questions, but maybe I shouldn't. In any case, look, you guys have a great partnership. I'd love to hear more about it and maybe I'll start with you, Cesar. Tell me about the partnership and what it means for NetApp.

Cesar Cernuda

>> Well, first of all, thank you for having us here. Great to be with you, Aaron. What, we've been teaming up for the last 20 years?

Aaron Amendolia

>> Yeah.

Cesar Cernuda

>> The first thing that I'll say is this partnership has been built on trust. And trust means, hey, working on their needs of the NFL. We've been the last years actually working and building intelligent data infrastructure. At the end of the day, what we're trying to do is to ensure that we can help the NFL to meet their goals. And in this case, using data to meet their goals. And part of what we're trying to do now is how we prepare this data for the AI and ensure that we can help NFL and the fans and followers to access to the information, access the data the way they need, et cetera, et cetera. So thank you so much for the trust.

Aaron Amendolia

>> And the trust is earned. It's 20 years of a high-performance environment and, obviously, the NFL expects excellence in the game and we want to see it back out of our partners as well because, literally, the quality of what our fans see and what we deliver to them is on the line. And so our integrity is there with our environment, with our technology because that's what's used to deliver the entire game itself plus fan experience, so the trust has to be earned.

Cesar Cernuda

>> Thank you for that. 100%.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Right. So it's very interesting because you think about the NFL, you think about the past 25 years, 20 years, let's say 20 years because of the duration of the partnership, the way you watched a game or you attended a game 20 years ago was very different. The game was not that different.

Aaron Amendolia

>> A lot less technology in the stadium there.

Christophe Bertrand

>> But it was very, very different. So much has changed. So I'm curious, Aaron, from your standpoint, what type of data challenges are you seeing now or have you seen within the past 20 years? But more importantly, where are the junctions now?

Aaron Amendolia

>> Well, I mean, the first challenge there is just the volume. So you go from essentially a very slim operating taking stats to what we have now, a ring of 32 cameras, six of them 8K, the remaining in 4K, plus the broadcast coming in. That's 1.4 terabytes of video data per game. You multiply that times a season. We're looking at about half a petabyte of just video data coming on. And then we have sensors on the players. We have all the metadata created around the game itself. And then we have post-processes for player health and safety for our media operations, for all of our fan experiences. So really, this is like our game is made in the stadium, that's our product, but then there's all these derivative products and partners in that supply chain that we connect to. So just massive growth over the 20 years in the amount of data being created and coming and being distributed from the stadium.

Christophe Bertrand

>> It's a question I was curious about. I should have asked you earlier as we were preparing. The NFL, it's a big business. I mean, is there a number on how many billions of dollars the NFL represents today?

Aaron Amendolia

>> It's out there. I'm trying to use that incoming revenue wisely to invest in the right platforms and to make sure that it's there to support the business. You have billions of revenue, but it has to be supported by a backend technology and then has to be secure. So you're also not only performing, but you want to make sure that you have a risk mitigation, that you have a cyber compliance with your cyber team and that all your risk mitigation is in place with the technology platforms that you choose. Part of the reason we chose NetApp, things like the ransomware protection.

Christophe Bertrand

>> The last thing we want is the Super Bowl being interrupted by cyber attack. We don't want any of that.

Aaron Amendolia

>> We prepare.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Right, and you are because you have the right partnerships in place.

Aaron Amendolia

>> That's right.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Now, let's talk about continuing a partnership but also the expansion of the business. Obviously, your global company and the NFL is also trying to expand globally. So how are you helping from a NetApp standpoint?

Cesar Cernuda

>> Yeah. Look, first of all, we're super excited, because we've been actually ... Last week in London, we've done Dublin already, we did London as well. And one of the things that really is fascinating is to see how this 218 million fans that you have in the US, how do we expand that internationally? And being your partner to bring that experience as well to the rest of the world is a big responsibility. But at the same time, it's fun. Seeing how we can get people, now in November we're going to do Madrid, for example, the 16th of November, which I think you're going to be there. I'll be there as well.

Aaron Amendolia

>> Yeah, super excited. Berlin as well prior.

Cesar Cernuda

>> It's the first time ever that the NFL is going to play a game in Madrid, in Spain as we have done Dublin for the first time as well. It's an amazing experience for them, experience for the fans where you were talking about all these cameras, how we're going to get the players, understanding, tracking the data from the players. We want to make sure that experience is the same in any given game internationally, but also the ticketing system. What we're trying to do is to ensure that the experience that for all these years people in the US had, we can bring that as well outside of the US. That's what we're working with the NFL now.

Aaron Amendolia

>> Yeah, that's our main challenge. It's that everywhere we go in the world it's different. And I even say there's a culture to how different places, regions, people do technology, and we are going to bring our game. And in the US, we have the luxury of really some of the most advanced stadiums with connectivity, with the ability to host components with the broadcast technology coming out, with almost on-site data centers that are hybrid cloud, and every stadium is really an advanced data center. Well, now, we're going to move out of the US and we're going to borrow a stadium just for one game sometimes, for one day. And we don't get to be there the luxury of setting up all year for that. We're going to come in the week before and build out. Yes, we're going to plan and do all that, but we might have a soccer game that week. We're there to play the football game. So we have to be very flexible and agile. But to Cesar's point, we're going to bring the same experience that we do in the US to all of these international games, which means we have to have a portable model that's robust, that's easy to operate, to set up, and still can capture all that data we talked about earlier in a stadium that we don't own and we don't normally host in.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Right. And a global partner to do so. That's very obvious, but easier said than done. And clearly this is a very interesting component to the partnership. You mentioned the fan experience earlier. Can you break it down for us in terms of how you use the NetApp technology to improve this fan experience in the stadiums in general terms?

Aaron Amendolia

>> Yeah. And data and content are at the core of it, right? So you have to have this healthy, robust core to be able to get those experiences out. So when we're capturing all these video streams or we're capturing data streams and restoring them, we also have to get them and redistribute them back out, right? And some of those workloads we do within our AMGC in New York, we're bringing data back there. We're bringing content back there for officiating reasons. And obviously, that's probably more important and more passion to the fans than anything else is what's happening in the game and how our decisions about the game and their emotions and their hopes are on the line. We want to make sure we get that accurate. So we have to have top performance there. But then also, just what we do with our media workflows, the NFL network, our broadcasting partners, our media partners, social, all those types of clipping of what's happening in the game and marrying that to data from the next-gen, stats, sensors. This is all happening basically from the core of our storage where we keep everything and then back out again. So really, that robust core is really what's important. That's one of the keystones of our operation. And then everything else is just hopefully the fan is happy, but there's all the game. I know everybody can't be happy all the time. Somebody is going to win and somebody is going to lose, but do we make that experience around it memorable and amazing?

Cesar Cernuda

>> That's right.

Aaron Amendolia

>> That's right.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Yes. And there's so much ... So interconnected and it's sometimes not just the one game you're at, it's the other games and knowing what's happening and the apps that have to work together.

Aaron Amendolia

>> That's right.

Christophe Bertrand

>> So there are lots of dimensions associated with it. So it's a very interesting business because that's really what it is with unique characteristics. I'm wondering, how does this translate, Cesar, to other verticals? Are there some learnings from this experience? I mean building out a whole infrastructure for one game. I mean, there are industries in which they think you're nuts. So how does it translate and what do you-

Cesar Cernuda

>> Actually, it's fascinating. I'll say two things. One of the things that probably we have learned through this partnership is that game day, it's like running an enterprise in terms of, hey, this is an end-to-end. That day is an end-to-end game, if you wish. At the same time, it's been fascinating for us as well to see some of the numbers that you have shared, Aaron, which is, look, we have this speed, you have all these million of people watching you live where data is at the core. We need to access all that data real time. And frankly speaking, we've been doing this for years. Think about financial services for example. When you're doing transactions where you need to have real-time interoperability, performance reliability, security. Healthcare, or you're going through a surgery, how do you access all that data? And you say, this is a real ... We're talking about lives, right? So healthcare, financial services, manufacturing. Think of manufacturing, how do you really need to go and operate those things? So there's a lot of similarities. At the same time, we would love to have this partnership on the sports side and NFL really teaches a lot of things. I always put the example of Formula One where the millisecond makes a big difference. So accessing data in a real time, fast is key. So certainly, you can explore and learn for different industries and bring this live with NFL as well.

Aaron Amendolia

>> Yeah, I think being able to scale. I mean, what business doesn't want to move fast with confidence? That's really it. That if you have the right components and your architecture and your technology, then you can scale them and you can do new things. And you don't have this guesswork about, is it going to work? Is it going to work in Brazil? Yeah, we're confident it's going to work in Brazil. We've been playing in Sao Paulo, we're going on to Rio now. Haven't really planned the Rio Stadium yet. We'll be there in less than a year. Don't even have the luxury of a full year to plan that game. But when you have the right partner there, you can move fast and you can still perform at that level that you've achieved.

Christophe Bertrand

>> So this is the fan experience, I get that. So we covered some of that and how it translates to other verticals and vice versa. So that's what's on the truck today, but really, the big prize is what we talked about all day long, which is AI. And I really want to know from your standpoint, how do you leverage NetApp for your core AI strategy? Specifically, what are the components and what do you expect from your partner to help you with your strategy?

Aaron Amendolia

>> I think it's about having a comprehensive portfolio that helps you in all different places. So for us, we have storage that has to be performant and fast for those real-time low-latency types of workflows, like moving video back and forth and in hyper-slow motion and advancing fast to make a decision in the game, and then we have deep archives. We talked about all these half a petabyte of video coming in every season, but we want to go back to that archive for insights, and humans can't really sort all that data. Now, you have this infrastructure, you want to help with real-time decision-making, and you want to see where AI can help you there. And then you want to help to look back and make important insights about your business, whether it's for player health and safety, or it's for a media story, get me all the clips related to this amazing storyline from the past. That's really where you have to have the right foundation, and you have to do it not just in a way that's compatible with AI but is also affordable. We have to run a business here too as well. So that value to the investment we make has to be there.

Christophe Bertrand

>> And what's your perspective? What have you seen from your interaction and how you're supporting the league here?

Cesar Cernuda

>> Yeah, I think you said it right, Aaron. And I would say probably data is one of the most strategic assets that NFL has. So as you think about data and how do you build an intelligent data infrastructure take advantage of that data is key. Many of the AI projects today fail because you have not really prepared your data for AI. And I think what we've been working with NFL is making sure that the data is prepared, that we really have a strategy and a differentiation there, and that's what we're working together. That goes back to what are the outcomes and goes back to that fan experience, ticketing experience, making sure that even how do we track players and how we can go and even anticipate with AI. So we're super engaged there and linking some of the work that they're doing with some of our own learnings and trying to bring that outline.

Aaron Amendolia

>> I think it's important also that the components work together with the real ecosystem you use, right? So we're talking about storage and we're talking about NetApp, but we use other things, right? We have the AWS Cloud, we have Microsoft, we have these other partners. And that's really key to us is that NetApp works within this ecosystem.

Cesar Cernuda

>> That's right.

Aaron Amendolia

>> So we have consistent standards we can manage with data governance, with cybersecurity, with protection, but we can scale that out across all these other areas where we might have a best-in-class workload running somewhere, but we don't want to give up all the controls that we've put in place behind it.

Christophe Bertrand

>> I understand. And brings up another question, which is that of costs, which of course is always a hot topic. Never a fun one, but an important one because in the end that's what matters the most in terms of operational efficiency, managing costs, understanding your costs. And specifically, Cesar, I'd like to know more about what you're doing from a NetApp perspective with the cloud component of costs, and how you're helping the league. Because I know you've done a tremendous amount of work on the product side. Clearly, there are some advantages. How is that playing out for costs?

Cesar Cernuda

>> Yeah. First thing I'll say is, and you mentioned Microsoft and other partners that you're working with in the ecosystem. One of the things that we feel very proud is that power of choice. So in other words, at the end of the day, what we're bringing is on top our operating system. And in this case NFL, you say, "How are we going to go and operate to first protect your total cost of ownership, get the best out of all of us, and use the different workloads?" Actually, this truly hybrid cloud environment where you say, "This workload, I'm going to have it in my on-prem environment. Or this workload, I'm going to use it in a public cloud." To really optimize our investments, this 20 years, one of the things that we've been working on is to make sure that we protect the total cost of ownership of our customers. We proudly said we want to bring AI into your data, not other way around, bring data into your AI. And the reason we're saying that is we understand that you have all these investments done. I want to make sure that we prepare the technology to bring AI into the investments you have done with data. And as you know, we have actually managed to build this partnership with the three largest hyperscalers. So today, we have brought ONTAP into AWS, we have brought ONTAP as well into Google Cloud, and we have brought ONTAP into Azure in this case to Microsoft. So in this case, NFL can decide where and how to use our technology, which hyperscaler on-prem or in a truly hybrid cloud environment.

Aaron Amendolia

>> Yeah. I would also look at it this way. With new technology, you fail when you're constrained. So when there's an emerging technology out, and if I have to go to our executive team, to our product team and say, "Well, we can't do this because we made a choice in the way we store our data," that's a failure. The data has to move with the new technology, and the opportunity has to be able to be seized. And that's what's important here is that NetApp is always evolving its portfolio and they're always updating. So we don't feel like we've made a choice that's constrained us. Because If we have, we've already broken out of that, we wouldn't have a 20-year relationship. They are moving and evolving the portfolio with the changes in technology, which says we're able to protect our core data in the right way and utilize it where it has the most value.

Cesar Cernuda

>> I think that's a big commitment that we have on innovation and that's expectation that our customers have. And in this case, NFL has put on us expecting that, hey, we're going to evolve with technology. We can go and anticipate to their needs and making sure that the investment they have done with us, we can protect them by bringing that technology every single day to them.

Christophe Bertrand

>> And operational efficiency is at the heart of it, innovation. But very quickly as we wrap up here, I'm curious about security and resilience. We touched upon it, it's come back multiple times. Clearly, there's no AI without great data, trusted data, compliant data, but it has to be resilient. And, of course, every day, you're running quite a bit of operation that has to run, that has to be available where you can't afford to lose data, more importantly. So how have you leveraged the technology that NetApp has brought to the table to make this happen? And how critical is it in your thinking or in the removal of those constraints that you are mentioning?

Aaron Amendolia

>> Yeah, I think that it gets harder and harder, meaning the expectation of where your RPO is, your recovery point objective, your recovery time objective where they are, these have just gotten so much tighter. And for years, we've been using tools like Snapshots and SnapMirror to protect our environment, replicating across data centers and now up to the cloud and the hybrid cloud environment. But that's that security that we have that, all right, there's a way our data is protected and we can write SLAs back to our business and say, "These are the guarantees we have with the foundation that we have." And on top of that, we have these ransomware protections as well that makes our CISO very happy. As a close partner of mine, we're actually making sure we're mitigating the right risks. And then we understand where our recovery points and our recovery times are and we're able to select our data storage portfolio around that. And that's built into that guarantee versus we're trying to retrofit it with other solutions external from it. So I think it's been a super important part for me because it gives me the ability to sleep at night, which is so important. That's right, as we move across all these environments, but it's really important to us.

Cesar Cernuda

>> Well, I would say, just to add, if you allow me, Aaron. I think, first of all, thank you for the trust, but that of course requires a lot of investment from our side to make sure that we protect you in this case and have a secure environment, but not at the expense of having lack of data management capabilities. So one of the things I want to make sure is that we're in those data management capabilities. And I'll even say this single control pane where you can have access to and see where your data is, how it's performing, and be able to even interpret it between your data. So all those things combined are the ones that we're trying to put in place.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Well, gentlemen, thank you so much for telling us about your partnership. It's been great. I think there are lots of best practices and I really had no idea there was so many dimensions and use cases at play when you just watch the game or you go to the stadium, you don't think about all of this. So this has been really fantastic. Thank you so much for joining us.

Cesar Cernuda

>> Thank you so much, Christophe. It was great to be here with you.

Christophe Bertrand

>> And thank you to our viewers. NetApp INSIGHT 2025. Thank you for watching. I'm Christophe Bertrand, Principle Analyst for theCUBE Research.