Success Stories

" In the case of anything critical, there's just no question what platform we use. If it's gotta be up, it's gotta be a Sun system!"

Getting the paper out the door on time every day has always been the mission-critical application of a newspaper,and in recent years it is just as essential to keep the online edition dependably on the air as well. For hard copy and electronic publishing and many other applications, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution relies on Sun Enterprise servers from Sun Microsystems, Inc.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has an enviable record for reliability in delivering the news to Atlanta both in print and over the Web. The paper shares credit for this accomplishment with Sun and the nearly perfect uptime record delivered by Sun platforms.

Number One Newspaper in the Cox Chain

Atlanta Journal-Constitution publishes both of Atlanta's major daily newspapers. The company is a very prominent member of the nationwide Cox newspaper chain with the Atlanta Constitution and the Atlanta Journal. These two dailies have a combined circulation that is more than twice as large as any other Cox family paper.

In 1995, the Cox organization undertook a modernization of its newspapers publishing systems, beginning with a thorough examination of leading application software suites. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution played a major role in the evaluation, which led to the adoption of Digital Technology International (DTI) as the new standard for the entire Cox family.

Originally we chose Sun servers to host the applications for the simple reason that DTI recommended them, said Bob Jones, Senior Systems Analyst. We were to soon learn the reason why DTI was so high on Sun servers their simply awesome dependability. In the six years we've been using Sun servers and storage arrays, we've had to call on Sun for help only once and that was for a previous generation disk array. The problem arose at two o'clock in the morning, but the Sun support people gave us the support we needed and we were able to fix the problem in a couple of hours.

For its publishing applications, the paper employs three high availability clusters, each consisting of three Sun Enterprise servers. A trio of Sun Enterprise 4500 servers comprise one cluster. The other two clusters consist of trios of Sun Enterprise 3000 and 4000 servers, respectively. In each of the clusters, two of the three servers are dedicated to production while the third is a failover backup for both production servers. The entire clustering scheme is managed by high availability software from Veritas. Sybase is the system's database.

"The current production environment evolved through at least four generations of Sun servers over the years," said Jones. "Every migration was quite painless -- a testament to Sun's scalability. Sunday mornings are the one time during the week when things are quiet enough around here for major configuration changes and in every case we were up and running on the new hardware by the time the busy period kicked back in later in the day.

Sun Technology Permeates the Papers Internet and Intranet Presence

The Internet is growing rapidly in importance for publishing news.The Atlanta Journal-Constitution posts much of the content of its papers on its own Website and feeds additional content to Cox, which publishes its own site.

The Internet is every bit as critical an application as the hard copy newspaper, so of course we use Sun technology throughout, said Jones. Sun Enterprise servers host our Website, firewalls, DNS,and sendmail. We develop all our own applications, and we're soon planning to complement our PERL-oriented development environment with Java programming. We use Sun, Macintosh, and PC platforms for development, and the platform independence we'll get with Java technology will greatly increase our ability to get work done.

Jones is on a team that is responsible for development of another exciting project underway at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution -- an Intranet tracking system that will greatly improve efficiency and provide insight into ways the production process can be improved. "The tracking system will give us the big picture of what's happening at each step in the newspaper production process all the way down to the creation of printing plates," he explained. It's a very important project to the paper, so naturally we're basing it on Sun Enterprise servers."

Because of Sun's outstanding performance record, Sun Enterprise servers are now the standard for mission-critical applications not only at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution but throughout the Cox newspaper chain. At the Journal-Constitution alone, there are over forty Sun servers that span several generations and serve a multitude of other purposes.

"For a system that's a crucial link in the production of a newspaper, downtime is simply unacceptable,"Jones concluded. "That's why in the case of anything critical, there's just no question what platform we use. If it's gotta be up, it's gotta be a Sun system!"