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Keep the Presses Rolling
At St. Galler Tagblatt, IT innovation never stops - By James Mathewson
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The daily newspaper business can be tough. From the constant phone chatter of the reporter's pit to the frantic pace of the layout and production crews, there's little time to take a breath. St. Galler Tagblatt of St. Gallen, Switzerland, the largest newspaper in eastern Switzerland, is no exception. Its 108,000 print subscribers and burgeoning mass of online devotees depend on a well-oiled machine to deliver the news they need to their doorsteps and PCs. Add radio and TV stations and a partnership with its major shareholder, Zurich-based Neue Zuercher Zeitung (NZZ), and you have a highly complex enterprise of more than 1,000 employees.
To keep the presses running and the news flowing over the air and online takes more than a great team of reporters, editors, sales people and production managers. It takes a lot of IT personnel. In this case, 20 dedicated administrators, programmers and IT directors ensure that the information systems keep this well-oiled machine running at peak performance. In this environment, downtime isn't an option and architects must keep the infrastructure performing as fast as the latest technologies will allow.
In addition to the typical back-end systems for accounting, human resources and payroll, St. Galler Tagblatt also must worry about ever-shifting subscriber databases, both in print and online. And a recent subscriber database consolidation with NZZ, which boasts more than 150,000 print and thousands more online subscribers, required a strong combination of hardware and software value. The choice included 64-bit IBM eServer® xSeries® Model 455 servers (one for each company's subscriber databases) running Novell® SUSE LINUX 8 and the open-source database technology MaxDB® (formerly SAP DB), which connects to the SAP applications.
The subscriber system migration is just the first of several workloads migrating to SAP on Linux. The migration is only part of a large strategic partnership between St. Galler Tagblatt and NZZ, in which the Zurich datacenter will consolidate both companies' Windows® workloads and the St. Galler datacenter will consolidate both companies' SAP workloads separately.
"We are an innovative thinking company and look to use leading-edge technology in new projects," says Erich Giesinger, head of IT services for St. Galler Tagblatt. "We choose 64-bit technology for better processing power and Linux with the open-source MaxDB database to consolidate the running costs of our IT systems". |
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Though the subscriber databases are only two of several workloads spread across dozens of servers in the St. Galler datacenter, they're pivotal cogs of the St. Galler Tagblatt/NZZ machine. Not only do subscriptions themselves bring in revenue, but advertising representatives sell ads on the basis of the publications' subscription numbers. Advertisers pay to get response for their ads, and response is directly proportional to the numbers and demographics of a publication's subscriber database.
According to Giesinger, readers can order subscriptions for the publications online, and the SAP application can process the request the same day. Also, the new system handles the growing numbers of online subscriptions for both publications. NZZ (www.nzz.ch) already has a premium online subscription publication (www.nzzglobal.ch) in addition to its free Web site. St. Galler Tagblatt only has the free Web site (www.tagblatt.ch), though it too plans to launch a subscription service of premium online content in October. In addition, both media companies have several other custom and weekly publications that complement their daily offerings. All of these subscriber databases and their associated applications run on the four-way xSeries servers.
Giesinger says subscriber management is more efficient under then new SAP system running under Linux. He says subscriber management has become a just-in-time process, which improves efficiency and saves costs.
"We can ship the newspaper in batch jobs, and subscribers can stay in the system until the address is prepared," he says. "Because of the new system, we can send the addresses directly to the print machine on the newspaper a lot faster than we did before. This speeds up the printing process and ultimately reduces costs." |
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Giesinger says the migration from Oracle on HP-UX to SAP on Linux had its moments, and required a full complement of partners to get the most out of the combination of technologies. But once completed, the workloads running on the new 64-bit Linux server demonstrated three-fold performance improvements with standard tuning parameters set.
The first partner in the mix was the xSeries reseller, Bechtle Data AG, who suggested the x455 servers based on low total cost of ownership (TCO), and delivered the servers to meet that requirement. That was the easy part. Migrating the operating system, applications and backup storage area network (SAN) system proved to be challenging.
"Frankly, the migration was not very easy," he says. "Oracle and SAP use different indexes, so we had a performance problem in the beginning. But consultants from SAP saved us by helping us make the right indexes on the database. Once we did that, it performed much better."
As challenging as the database migration was, the SAN integration was much trickier, says Giesinger. "We didn't have the know how with Linux and MaxDB to implement the back-up system on our SAN," he says. "Our StorageTek library was not supported."
Giesinger says, once again, a strategic partner stepped up to help with the migrations. This time, TDS Multivision AG, which led the migration efforts, suggested new firmware on the drives in the disk array. When that change was made, the database and SAN system integrated smoothly.
"Partners helped us at every stage, especially with tuning," says Giesinger. "It would have been much more difficult without them." |
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Besides performance, the other main reason for the strategic investment is high availability. For this portion of the job, St. Galler Tagblatt turned to LifeKeeper for Linux from SteelEye Technology Inc. This cluster software can coordinate up to 32 computers and has certified kits for managing, controlling, and protecting a large numbers of applications. Clusters provide failover: In case one server goes down, others are available to seamlessly take over their workloads. With LifeKeeper cluster technology, enterprises can approach 99.7 percent uptime.
While availability on the subscriber database is critical, the other aspects of St. Galler Tagblatt's solution are mission critical. When the other parts of the company's SAP back-end systems come online, the high-availability cluster solution will be put to the test. These solutions include finance, controlling, asset management and human resources, advertisement management and sales, billing of shipping charges, collection, and accounting for various subsidiaries.
"We regard SAP as a strategic partner to our company," explains Giesinger. "We will be converting all our operational business processes to SAP software in the medium term." |
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Giesinger says the decision to run the subscriber workload on xSeries servers was based on IBM's leadership in Linux development and the TCO of Linux on Intel. In addition, "before we had HP-UX, we ran SAP on AIX® with IBM machines and we were always satisfied," he says, adding that the company was especially pleased with IBM's service and support.
The xSeries platform also sets scalability standards in the 4- to 16-way Intel® server market with its high-performance Enterprise X-Architecture with XpandOnDemand processors. The Enterprise X-Architecture is similar to other IBM eServer Capacity on Demand offerings, which allow enterprises to only pay for the computing power they need, when they need it. Each 4-way processor node contains processors, cache, memory, and storage that can stand alone as a single server or be connected to other nodes to become 8- 12- or 16-way servers.
As St. Galler Tagblatt and NZZ continue to grow their media empires in northern and eastern Switzerland, Giesinger and his crew of IT architects can keep the presses running and the sales orders flowing without worrying about running out of server capacity. In the short term, he's pleased with the performance increases with only the subscriber database workload migrated.
"Address data are now prepared three times faster than before, and our Internet-based processes have also become a lot faster," he says. "The users are finding the new system very easy to use, and it also allows us sufficient leeway for future growth--one of our central concerns." |
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| James Mathewson has more than a decade of experience producing technology-related content for print and online media. Currently, he is editor at large for ComputerUser magazine and editor of IBM-s Virtual Innovation Center for Hardware (VIC-H) Web site. |
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