Austin American-Statesman
Enabling Round-the-Clock System Availability and ProductionThe Austin American-Statesman is the major daily newspaper for Austin, Texas. Owned by Cox Enterprises, the newspaper is in the top 100 U.S. newspapers and claims a circulation of 185,000 daily and 235,000 Sunday. As the only daily paper in Austin since 1994, the Austin American-Statesman traces its origins back to the Democratic Statesman, which began publication every three weeks beginning in July 1871. Customer Challenges
SolutionThe Austin American-Statesman, with help from Sun partner Digital Technology International (DTI), deployed a redundant Sun hardware configuration in a cluster layout with fibre channel connectivity for all storage arrays. Business Results
Story DetailsIn today’s fast-paced newspaper industry, timely output and distribution are key to success. The challenge for the Austin American-Statesman’s IT department is to provide 24x7 access for users of the editorial and advertising systems. “News happens every day of the week, any hour of the day,” says Tom Jones, UNIX Administrator for the Austin American-Statesman. “We’ve been producing a daily newspaper since 1873, and we’ve gone over 130 years without missing an edition.” With readers expecting unflinching punctuality from their news sources, and with increasing competition coming from more agile online media enterprises, the newspaper must constantly find new ways to safeguard its publishing schedule and defend its market position. Even a slight slippage in a newspaper’s publishing schedule could mean disaster, with readers quickly turning to other media channels. “It’s critical to deliver the paper on time in the morning, every morning,” says Jones. “Newspaper deadlines are a real time crunch, especially from 9 p.m. to 2 a.m. We have to have systems that are always available. Our maintenance windows are very slim. We don’t have a large IT staff, which is part of the problem because we can’t provide staffing for systems every night and on holidays. That’s why we rely on the Sun hardware and software, and why it’s important to get the architecture right from the beginning.”
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As long as Sun continues to make reliable and dependable systems, I’ll be able to sleep at night.
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— Tom Jones, UNIX Administrator, Austin American-Statesman
To minimize the need for staff to manually recover from a failure, the Austin American-Statesman replaced older Sun Enterprise 4000 servers with Sun Fire V1280 servers clustered together for high availability and automated recovery. Sun partner DTI, a leader in publishing solution technologies, helped the newspaper implement a monitoring agent as part of the Sun Cluster to monitor failover. The newspaper upgraded its critical storage systems with Sun StorageTek 3510 FC fibre-channel arrays dual-attached to both servers. The newspaper also uses Sun StorageTek L25 tape libraries to back up the advertising and editorial database server clusters. The Austin American-Statesman is now set for future archive expansion with additional arrays that can easily be added without downtime. In the day-to-day operations of the newspaper, the level of system responsiveness has dramatically increased system stability and user satisfaction. Performance reviews indicate that, to date, the new system has run well, with no server downtime. “The data is our business,” says Jones. “We can make one call to Sun to get our problems taken care of. We have some very reliable Sun hardware and software—in fact one of our servers has been running for over 600 days without a reboot.” As the business of the newspaper continues to expand and increased numbers of journalists and editors come to rely on round-the-clock system availability, the Sun system continues to exceed all expectations, smoothly and reliably maintaining the newspaper’s mission-critical applications. |
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