Communications

Case Study:

Johnston Press

4 May 2007

The digital publishing arm of Johnston Press, the UK's second largest local newspaper publisher, has matched the growth of its audience by installing a Dell server farm, after a proof of concept exercise and rigorous pre-implementation testing.

Johnston Press saw the opportunity to exploit its leadership position in many regions of the UK to earn advertisement revenue from Web site publishing. Local press thrives on community interaction, both in news and advertising. Classified advertisements for jobs, property and cars drive the business.

Electronic Publishing is responsible for the company's web presence and hosts 290 Web sites. The department's role is to deliver the site and technologies infrastructure. The IT team manages Web site information so it can be updated easily without the newspapers needing to know much about the internet.

Perhaps the volumes of business and the speed of take-up were not entirely foreseen or planned for. In 2001 Johnston Press's Web site business was worth ?300,000, but by 2005 this figure had grown to £6.9 million, with 3.2 million unique users per month. Page impressions for 2005 were up by 49 per cent year on year, exceeding 30 million per month. Seventy five page impressions and 220 customer transactions every second is the kind of performance required by an online publisher of this size.

Electronic Publishing developed its IT infrastructure in an adhoc manner to meet demand but a review of the situation concluded that it needed a replacement IT infrastructure. As the preferred vendor for parent company Johnston Press, Dell provided a consultant, who gave an independent opinion and delivered the best business case for Microsoft SQL Server 2005.

As part of the solution, Dell offered a proof of concept (POC) environment. This meant Dell pre-built a replacement infrastructure at its enterprise solution centre based in Ireland. The POC highlighted the advantages of Dell implementing Microsoft SQL Server.

The Microsoft SQL Server 2005, married with Dell, has increased the overall performance of the business. There is now greater throughput and improved query notification. Additionally, business intelligence and enhanced management features are being employed for analysing how users move around the Web sites.

To ensure secure data storage, the infrastructure included a Dell/EMC CX500 storage area network (SAN). It delivers continuous availability for business-critical data running off the Dell PowerEdge servers. Dell also introduced BIG-IP technology, a web traffic management device that distributes processing and communicates activity evenly across the network to avoid servers being overwhelmed.

The servers in the web farm are split into three pools of five, so there is redundancy if one goes down. Servers can also be moved in and out. Figures show that previously the average CPU usage figure was 85 per cent, but this has dropped to 10 per cent with the new Dell PowerEdge blade servers.

As well as some bespoke applications within the architecture, there is Microsoft Application Centre 2000, which is designed to help Web site administrators to deploy applications quickly and easily, while minimising the application knowledge required.

The Dell PowerVault ML6010 enhances reliability and means that Electronic Publishing can scale its SAN solution as readers choose web access for their local news and data volume consequently grows.

Since implementation of the infrastructure, Electronic Publishing - which is signed up to Dell Gold Enterprise Support services - has avoided any downtime. An example of the new hardware promoting business continuity occurred recently when one of the Dell PowerEdge servers lost its power during an outage. Immediately, the SAN sent an email alerting the technical lead, who then escalated the issue to Dell.

Electronic Publishing says that Dell was there within the hour, and managed to get the kit back together in just six hours. This meant that there was no risk of reduced resilience of the platform for significant duration.