Chicago’s Tribunes Server Consolidation a Success
Chicago’s Tribunes Server Consolidation a Success
Summary
This case study is an analysis of the Chicago Tribunes Server consolidation in which the Chicago Tribune moved its critical applications from several mainframes and older Sun servers to new, dual-site data-center infrastructure based on Sun 15K servers. The Tribune clustered the Sun servers over a 2-mile distance, lighting up a dark-fiber, 1-Gbps link between two data centers. This configuration let the newspaper spread the processing load between the servers while improving redundancy and options for disaster recovery. (Baltzan and Philips, 2009 p 162)
Company Background
The Tribune is America’s largest employee-owned media company, operating businesses in publishing, interactive and broadcasting. In publishing, Tribune’s leading daily newspapers include the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Newsday (Long Island, N.Y.), The Sun (Baltimore), South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Orlando Sentinel, Hartford Courant, Morning Call and Daily Press. The Company’s broadcasting group operates 23 television stations, WGN America on national cable, Chicago’s WGN-AM and the Chicago Cubs baseball. (Tribune.com)
Case 2a 3
Tribune Interactive manages the interactive operations of Tribune’s daily newspapers and their associated websites, plus all aspects of the company’s classified advertising operations. Its national classified sites include CareerBuilder.com, Cars.com and Apartments.com. With more than 50 websites overall, Tribune Interactive ranks among the nation’s leading news and information networks. The sites attract more than 15.5 million visitors per month. (Tribune.com)
Information Systems Background
In the past the Chicago Tribune maintained applications for their operations on mainframes at two different locations. This was causing the mainframes to be underutilized and was costly to maintain both systems. While merging the 2 systems the Chicago Tribune experienced a five hour outage
Summary
This case study is an analysis of the Chicago Tribunes Server consolidation in which the Chicago Tribune moved its critical applications from several mainframes and older Sun servers to new, dual-site data-center infrastructure based on Sun 15K servers. The Tribune clustered the Sun servers over a 2-mile distance, lighting up a dark-fiber, 1-Gbps link between two data centers. This configuration let the newspaper spread the processing load between the servers while improving redundancy and options for disaster recovery. (Baltzan and Philips, 2009 p 162)
Company Background
The Tribune is America’s largest employee-owned media company, operating businesses in publishing, interactive and broadcasting. In publishing, Tribune’s leading daily newspapers include the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Newsday (Long Island, N.Y.), The Sun (Baltimore), South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Orlando Sentinel, Hartford Courant, Morning Call and Daily Press. The Company’s broadcasting group operates 23 television stations, WGN America on national cable, Chicago’s WGN-AM and the Chicago Cubs baseball. (Tribune.com)
Case 2a 3
Tribune Interactive manages the interactive operations of Tribune’s daily newspapers and their associated websites, plus all aspects of the company’s classified advertising operations. Its national classified sites include CareerBuilder.com, Cars.com and Apartments.com. With more than 50 websites overall, Tribune Interactive ranks among the nation’s leading news and information networks. The sites attract more than 15.5 million visitors per month. (Tribune.com)
Information Systems Background
In the past the Chicago Tribune maintained applications for their operations on mainframes at two different locations. This was causing the mainframes to be underutilized and was costly to maintain both systems. While merging the 2 systems the Chicago Tribune experienced a five hour outage
References: On Location: Chicago Tribune Server Consolidation http://www.networkcomputing.com Server Consolidation Delivershttp://www.informationweek.com About the Tribune, Tribune Publishing, Tribune broadcasting http://www.tribune.com Essentials of Business Driven Systems, Chicago’s Tribunes Server Consolidation a Success, Baltzan and Philips