Chicago Tribune's Server Consolidation a Success The Chicago Tribune is the seventh-largest newspaper in the country. Overhauling its data center and consolidating servers was a difficult task; however, the payoff was tremendous. The Chicago Tribune successfully moved its critical applications from a mishmash of mainframes and older Sun Microsystems servers to a new dual-site enterprise architecture, which has resulted in lower costs and increased reliability throughout the company.
The paper's new enterprise architecture clustered its servers over a two-mile distance, lighting up a 1 Gbps dark-fiber link-an optical fiber that is in place but not yet being used-between two data centers. This architecture lets the newspaper spread the processing load between the servers while improving redundancy and options for disaster recovery. The transfer to the new architecture was not smooth. 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 paper 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. After editorial applications were stabilized, the Tribune proceeded to migrate applications for operations-the physical production and printing of the newspaper-and circulation to the new enterprise architecture. "As we gradually took applications off the mainframe, we realized that we were incurring very high costs in maintaining underutilized mainframes at two different locations," said Darko Dejanovic, vice president and CTO of the Tribune Co., which owns the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, Long Island's Newsday, and about a dozen other metropolitan newspapers.
"By moving from two locations to one, we've achieved several million dollars in cost savings. There's no question that server consolidation was the right move for us. "The Tribune Co. is excited about its new enterprise architecture and is now looking to consolidate software across its newspapers. Currently, each newspaper maintains its own applications for classified advertising and billing, which means the parent company must support about 10 billing packages and the same number of classified-ad programs.
The Tribune Co. has found that most of the business processes can be standardized. So far, it has standardized about 95 percent of classified-ad processes and about 90 percent of advertising-sales processes. Over the next three years, the Tribune Co. will replace the disparate billing and ad applications across the company with a single package that will be used by all business units. The different newspapers will not necessarily share the same data, but they will have the same processes and the same systems for accessing them.
Over time, that will allow some of the call centers to handle calls for multiple newspapers; East Coast centers will handle the early-morning calls and West Coast centers the late-day and evening calls. The Tribune Co. is looking at a few additional projects including the implementation of hardware that will allow its individual applications to run on partial CPUs, freeing up processor power and making more efficient use of disk space
Questions
1. Review the five characteristics of infrastructure architecture and rank them in order of their potential impact on the Tribune Co.'s business.
2. What is the disaster recovery cost curve? Where should the Tribune Co. operate on the curve?
3. Define backups and recovery. What are the risks to the Tribune Co.'s business if it fails to implement an adequate backup plan?
4. Why is a scalable and highly available enterprise architecture critical to the Tribune Co.'s current operations and future growth?
5. Identify the need for information security at the Tribune Co.
6. How could the Tribune Co. use a "Classified Ad" Web service across its different businesses?