Chicago’s Tribunes Server Consolidation A Success

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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 because a small piece of software written for the transition contained a coding error that caused the Tribune's editorial applications to experience intermittent processing failures. As a result, the Tribune was forced to delay delivery to about 40 percent of its 680,000 readers and cut 24 pages from a Monday edition, costing the newspaper nearly $1 million in advertising revenue. (Baltzan and Philips, 2009 p 162) Case 2a 4 The Tribune Co. is also looking at consolidating other processes at other locations. The company's other newspapers are planning a move to a similar, clustered Sun server configuration in the near future. Several of the Tribune Co. newspapers have begun to explore ways to use one another as backup sites, though the lack of WAN-distance dark fiber limits the newspapers' ability to do clustering, as the Chicago Tribune did.

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