Chicago Tribune's Server Consolidation a Success-Analysis

MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEM K302
Analysis of “Chicago Tribune’s Server Consolidation a Success”
Aisylana esaC
Prepared for:
A.T.M. Jakaria Khan
Lecturer
Prepared by:
RH-41 Lamia Anwar Shama
Rh-45 Sylvia Islam
Institute of Business Administration
University of Dhaka
1 December 2014

Contents
Key Terms ............................................................................................................................................... 1
Overview of Tribune............................................................................................................................... 2
Analysis of the Case ................................................................................................................................ 3
Tribune’s IT infrstructure ................................................................................................................... 4
Challenges & Recovery ....................................................................................................................... 6
Consequences & Future Plans ............................................................................................................. 6
Case Questions & Answers ..................................................................................................................... 8
1. Review the five characteristics of infrastructure architecture and rank them in order of their potential impact on the Tribune Co.’s business. ................................................................................. 8
2. What is the disaster recovery cost curve? Where should the Tribune Co. operate on the curve? 9
3. Define backups and recovery. What are the risks to the Tribune’s business if it fails to implement an adequate backup plan? ............................................................................................... 10
4. Why is a scalable and highly available enterprise architecture critical to the Tribune Co.’s current operations and future growth? .............................................................................................. 11
5. Identify the need for information security at the Tribune Co. ...................................................... 12
6. How could the Tribune Co. use a classified ad Web service across its different businesses? ...... 13
References ............................................................................................................................................. 13

Management Information System K302
1
Key Terms
Terms
Definition
Data Center
A Data Center is a dedicated space where companies keep and operate their ICT infrastructure.
Companies need Data Centers when their connectivity, Applicarions & Continuity requirements become business critical.
Some companies locate their Data Centers in-house; others use an external facility belonging to a third party.
Server Consolidation
Server consolidation is an approach to the efficient usage of computer server resources in order to reduce the total number of servers or server locations that an organization requires. The practice developed in response to the problem of server sprawl, a situation in which multiple, under-utilized servers take up more space and consume more resources than can be justified by their workload.
Redundancy
Duplication of information, or storing the same information in multiple places. Redundant information occurs because organizations frequently capture and store the same information in multiple locations.
Clustering
Allows companies to chain together thousands of PCs to build mass- market systems.

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Overview of Tribune
For the purpose of Analysing the case, we’ll keep the overview of Chicago Tribune limited to the time and circumstance presented only in the case. However, we’ll give a very brief picture of the history and present day states of Chicago Tribune.
Founded in 1847, Chicago Tribune is the founding business unit of Tribune Company based in Chicago, Illinois, United States. The Pulitzer-Prize winning newspaper has a daily readership of 1.7 million and 2.7 million on Sunday. Formerly self-styled as the "World's Greatest Newspaper" (for which WGN radio and television are named), it remains the most-read daily newspaper of the Chicago metropolitan area and the Great Lakes region and is currently the second largest after its parent company purchased the Los Angeles Times (Wikipedia, 2014). Considered an industry leader in journalism and innovation, Chicago Tribune Media Group has grown into a multi-product, multi- channel news and information leader and reaches approximately 60 percent of adults. (newworldencyclopedia.org, 2007)
Chicago Tribune has its root in print journalism, but the Tribune Media Company (formerly known as Tribune Company) has evolved to embrace virtually every aspect of modern media. Tribune Media currently owns 42 TV stations in about 30 markets, cable network WGN America, and a stake in the Food Network. In addition, Tribune Media owns a number of online media properties, Tribune Studios, Tribune Digital Ventures, WGN-Radio, and a significant number of iconic real estate properties and strategic investments. In 2014 Tribune Company spun off its cornerstone newspaper publishing business into a newly formed company called Tribune Publishing Company and changed the name of the TV, radio, and digital business to Tribune Media.
In 2004, the time around which the case is described, Tribune Publishing Company was one of the USA’s top media companies, operating businesses in publishing and broadcasting. It reached more than 80 percent of U.S. households and was the only media organization with newspapers, television stations, and websites in the nation’s top three markets. In publishing, Tribune operated 11 leading daily newspapers including the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and Newsday, plus a wide range of targeted publications such as Spanish-language Hoy. The company’s broadcasting group operated 24 television stations, Superstation WGN on national cable, Chicago’s WGN-AM and the Chicago Cubs baseball team. Popular news and information websites complemented Tribune’s print and broadcast properties and extended the company’s nationwide audience.

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Analysis of the Case
The case presents the incident of the Chicago Tribune’s Server consolidation in which Tribune Publishing Company established two data centers, at about 2-mile distance. The server consolidation, replacing as many as five smaller systems by two Sun Fire 15K boxes, intended to clean up the Sun machines and implement real-time disaster recovery. A redundant fiber link would connect the data center and headquarters. Two separate networks would merge into a single network, the company would go from standby disaster recovery to active-active disaster recovery, and many applications would be upgraded.
The project would mean adding business continuity software and systems that will give the newspaper immediate access to data in the event of a network crash. The new architecture will give the Tribune a backup and disaster recovery design known as ‘active-active’ (if one location fails operation could be run from another location without losing any data), in the process replacing its current ‘active- passive’(if data were lost, the newspaper would have to recover the information from storage discs and tape, costing valuable time and money) approach (McMeekin, 2004). The network was also armed with load balancing capabilities that spread the processing load of the servers equally between the two locations i.e. at any given point, one can take the processing for the other.
The server consolidation represented a significant shift in the way Tribune viewed its systems infrastructure. One of the driving factors for the overhaul was Tribune Publishing Company’s desire to optimize content creation throughout the organization, while simultaneously reducing the total cost of ownership of their system via the centralization and standardization of their system’s infrastructure. The motivating factors for the consolidation primarily included-
 Bolstering backup and recovery
 Wanting hardwares and softwares that would enhance daily production
 Wanting to find a better and easier way to manage its hardwares

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Tribune’s IT infrstructure
A prominent force in American journalism for 150 years, Tribune Publishing Co.—which publishes The Chicago Tribune, New York’s Newsday, and The Los Angeles Times, among other major dailies—was forced to confront some post-millennial growing pains.
The information systems that hosted some of the Chicago Tribune Co.’s most important applications—including advertising, circulation, and database marketing programs – were more than half-a-decade old. What’s more, the maintenance costs associated with supporting them were growing more costly with each passing year. As if that wasn’t enough, Tribune’s aging hardware assets were under-utilized and under-available, which prevented the company from easily and inexpensively adding applications.
Chicago Tribune’s aging data center infrastructure was anchored by a pair of Sun Ultra Enterprise 10000 (E10K) servers, the 64-way behemoths that Sun first introduced more than seven years ago, along with a dozen or so other systems, including 14-way Sun UltraEnterprise 5500 boxes. The daily also tapped a mainframe system to support its marketing database and other workloads.
The Rx for the newspaper’s application and availability woes was dispensed by a quartet of companies: AT&T, EMC Corp., Nortel Networks, and Sun Microsystems Inc. Chicago Tribune tapped a pair of 72-processor SunFire Enterprise 15000 servers from Sun, optical switches from Nortel, new storage from EMC, and about four miles of black fiber from AT&T to build a scalable and available datacenter infrastructure.
Previously, the Chicago Tribune maintained applications for their operations on some mainframes, and on some Sun Microsystems minicomputers to reap the benefits of a distributed architecture and cut costs. It was a good system in itself, except tha IT had to maintain various Sun boxes at different OS levels and with different database versions. Disaster recovery was a concern as well, because all the Tribune's systems were at a single location. This resulted in system underutilization and consequently unncessary costs.
One of the driving factors for the consolidation of the servers was Tribune Publishing Company’s desire to optimize content creation throughout the organization, while simultaneously reducing the total cost of ownership of their system via the centralization and standardization of their system’s infrastructure. The process ofcourse represented a significant shift in the way Tribune viewed its systems infrastructure.

5
The result was an innovative single project that will eventually move the Tribune off of its legacy mainframes and onto a single cluster of Sun 15K servers. What's interesting about the server cluster is that it is extended across two buildings that are two miles apart. A dark fiber connection across the two main data centers will enable the Tribune to use the servers at both data centers in an active, clustered fashion. But because the two buildings are geographically separated, this approach also means that each data center can act as a backup for the other, eliminating the need for a passive backup data center for disaster recovery. (networkcomputing.com, 2004)
The new system’s infrastructure enabled Tribune to readily upgrade the system at a group level, ensuring reduced implementation time and maintenance cost. This infrastructure also established standardized workflow across each of the Tribune sites, ensuring a consistency in access to technology and at the operational level.

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The server consolidation project "was the right move for us," says Darko Dejanovic, VP and chief technology officer of Tribune Co.
Challenges & Recovery
The new dual-site infrastructure was based on Sun 15K servers, lighting up a 1-Gbps dark-fiber link-- optical fiber that's in place but not being used--between two data centers. Unfortuantely for Tribune, a coding error in a small software for transition caused occassional processing failures in editorial applications,resulting in a 5-hour delay of delivery to about 40 percent of its 680,000 readers and a reduction of 24 pages from a Monday edition, costing about $1 million in advertising revenue; later the glitch got resolved with a few changes. The Chicago Tribune, however, hung to the consolidation and got a very good result in the expected form of significant cost savings and system reliability in the long run. (Baltzan, 2009)
CCI Europe A/S, the Tribune's editorial-applications vendor, from then on, maintained a more regular on-site presence in the data center. Problem-escalation policies have been changed to help users raise concerns more quickly. Application-testing processes were modified to incorporate more thorough testing by business users. And to the IT staff's credit, the consolidation project not only stayed on track, it finished a few weeks ahead of schedule and about 10% under budget. (informationweek, 2005)
Consequences & Future Plans
The Chicago Tribune, after the overhauling process, gradually were able to consolidate and protect its business-critical applications, including the production of the newspaper's editorial and advertising content, customer service and billing, warehouse management, production planning and management, and customer data.
After editorial application, the Tribune proceeded to move apps for operations and circulation to the new Sun server environment. And while it was consolidating hardware, Tribune Co. also was looking to consolidate software. At the time each newspaper maintained 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 newspapers then standardized about 95% of classified-ad processes and about 90% of advertising-sales processes. Over the next three years, Tribune Co. will replace the disparate billing and ad applications across the company with a single package that will be used by all the business units.

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Chicago Tribune were working on some new projects as well. One was the implementation of Sun Solaris 10, which would let individual apps run on partial CPUs, freeing up processor power and making more efficient use of the Sun server cluster-both in terms of server capacity and clustering.
Outcomes
Reasons
The time needed for nightly batch-processing task dropped from about five hours to as little as one hour.
The 15Ks can split CPUs and memory across different process domains; they can shift processing power to where it is needed in a sort of "virtualization" mechanism.
Can add applications without increasing head count.
Fewer staffers are required to run the Sun Fire 15Ks
Increased application performance meaning increased user productivity
Increased application performance as the 15Ks are faster than previous servers owing to the high-speed data link and clustering
Cost savings
Downtime reduced to only 3-minute if one of the Sun 15Ks fail
Change-Control Factor
Instead of different machines with different revisions of the operating system, the staff can install and test each application on one of the test domains, and when all are ready to move to the newest OS release, they simply upgrade.

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Case Questions & Answers
1. Review the five characteristics of infrastructure architecture and rank them in order of their potential impact on the Tribune Co.’s business.
Infrastructure Architecture includes the hardware, software, and telecommunications equipment that, when combined, provide the underlying foundation to support the organization's goals. The following are the five primary characteristics of solid infrastructure architecture:
 Flexibility- Flexibility determines that systems are meeting all types of business changes. Organizations must watch today's business, as well as tomorrow's, when designing and building systems.
 Scalability- Scalability defines how well a system can adapt to increased demands. One of the ways to ensure that information technology infrastructure is scalable is by performing a capacity plan. This helps to determine adaptability to increase demands.
 Reliability- Reliability ensures that all systems are functioning correctly and providing accurate information.It is also another term for accuracy when discussing for the correctness of systems within the context of efficiency IT metrics.
 Availability- Availability addresses when systems can be accessed by employees, customers, and partners.
 Performance- Performance measures how quickly a system performs a certain process or transaction in terms of efficiency information technology metrics of both speed and throughput. A problem of not having enough performance capacity may have a tragic impact on the organization which can be avoided if taken the right procedures.
Ranking the given characteristics in order of their potential impact on business of Tribune Co. is a confounding task, as each and every characteristic is essential for any solid Infrastructure architecture and will have almost similar impact on Tribune’s business. Still as an all-Media conglomerate, Tribune will be impacted most by Performance and Availability-both of which rank together as (1). The reason is already portrayed in the case in the form of the 5-hour editorial processing delay costing nearly $1 million. Next comes Reliability ranking (2), as again a Media conglomerate, Tribune cannot afford neither an inaccuracy of its employees nor the incorrect performance of its Consolidated Server System. With increasing competition in the Media market, Tribune cannot but be ready with a flexible system, hence Flexibility ranks (3) as an infrastructure architecture character. It was owing to Flexibility that Chicago Tribune started the big project for consolidating its servers in an unprecendented way for the relevant industry. Last, but in no way of less importance, comes

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Scalability ranking (4). The whole Consolidation process was daunting in terms of money, time, operation and reputation-if the system architecture were not to be Scalable, the whole process would end up in nothing long-term. As stated by the CTO Darko Dejanovic, “...this project has brought us significant cost savings and improved our system reliability for the long run," – here the ‘long run’ refers to, mostly,Scalability of the system.
Infrastructure Architecture Chracteristics
Rank
Performance
1
Availability
Reliability
2
Flexibility
3
Scalability
4
2. What is the disaster recovery cost curve? Where should the Tribune Co. operate on the curve?
A disaster recovery cost curve charts (1) the cost to the organization of the unavailability of information and technology and (2) the cost to the organization of recovering from a disaster over time. A disaster recovery cost curve shows the amount it will cost for any organiztion to recover from a disaster, as well as how much it will cost the organization for the unavailability of information and technology. An organization’s disaster recovery cost curve must consider the cost of losing information and technology within each department or functional area, and the cost of losing information and technology across the whole organization. During the first few hours of a disaster, those costs will be low but become increasingly higher over time. With those costs in hand, an organization must then determine the costs of recovery. Cost of recovery during the first few hours of a disaster is exceedingly high and diminishes over time.
The interesting fact about Sun 15K server cluster of Tribune is that it is extended across two buildings that are two miles apart. A dark fiber connection across the two main data centers would enable the Tribune to use the servers at both data centers in an active, clustered fashion. But because the two

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buildings are geographically separated, this approach also means that each data center can act as a backup for the other, eliminating the need for a passive backup data center for disaster recovery.This Active/ Active replication system comprises of some major pros and cons which must be looked at before deciding where on the recovery cost curve should Tribune act:
Pros
Cons
¤ Little to no downtime.
¤ No data loss—data is always current
¤ Can be configured for automatic failover
¤ Easiest to revert back to normal environment after disaster scenario
¤ High cost for extra equipment and software (Highest cost of all the other possible solutions)
¤ Increased complexity
¤ Requires reliable (redundant) network between locations
¤ Potential exists for network connectivity issues between the two sites to result in a split-brain condition
¤ During a disruptive event, half of available resources are lost
In case of any disaster and the resulting failure of any one data center would mean high cost anyway, but it would also mean faster recovery, in this case only 3-minute delay, and finally lower cost due to failure- meaning Tibune must operate on the left side of the optimal point on the disaster recovery cost curve.
3. Define backups and recovery. What are the risks to the Tribune’s business if it fails to implement an adequate backup plan?
A backup is a copy of data from existing database that can be used to reconstruct that data. Backups can be physical and logical. It is an exact copy of a system’s information.
Recovery is the ability to get a system up and running in the event of a system crash or failure and includes restoring the information backup.

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For IT, the newspaper industry presents unique challenges. The term always available takes on new meaning, for example, when a missed publication deadline results in lost and irreplaceable advertising income. Shifts can’t be done to make up lost time in production. So, if the Tribune failed to backup and it lost all of its servers it would be devastating for its business, as already illustrated in the case. The 5-hour intermittent operation resulted in $1 million lost revenue and incurred costs. An organization like the Tribune Co. almost entirely depends on timely available information. If it fails to implement an adequate business plan- besides lost revenues and increased recovery costs, the business most likely will have to suffer extreme damage to reputation, compromised legal position, fines, court sanctions and raised profile as a litigation target, and even in extreme case a slow but sure bankruptcy.
4. Why is a scalable and highly available enterprise architecture critical to the Tribune Co.’s current operations and future growth?
A scalable system is one whose performance increases (or decreases) after hardware is added or removed somewhat proportionally to the capacity added or removed i.e. the capacity of a scalable system can be increased or decreased as the needs of the business change
The availability of a system or any component in that system is defined by the percentage of time that it works normally. High availability is the ability to provide user access to a service or application for a high percentage of scheduled time by attempting to reduce unscheduled outages and mitigate the impact of scheduled downtime for particular servers. A solution is highly available if it meets the organization’s scheduled uptime goals.
For example, a system that works normally for twelve hours per day is 50% available. A system that has 99% availability is down 3.65 days per year on average. Critical systems may need to meet exceptionally high availability standards, and experience as little as four to five minutes of downtime per year.
The alignment between Business Processes (BP) and Information Technologies (IT) is a major issue in most organizations, as it directly impacts the organization's agility and flexibility to change according to business needs. The concepts upon which alignment is perceived are addressed in what is called today the "Enterprise Architecture", gathering business and IT together.
For IT, the newspaper industry, or media industry, presents unique challenges. The term “IT” takes new meaning Media or Newspaper industry, for example, when a publication deadline is missed the results come in the form of lost and irreplaceable advertising income. Shifts can’t be done to make up

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lost time in production. So, it is absolutely essential for Tribune Co. to have a scalable and highly available enterprise architecture for its current operations and future growth.
High availability for Tribune Co. would mean Virtualization, new servers, watchdog to detect failed servers, redundant data centers etc. Scalability for them could pronounce into Server Consolidation. The fast and ever changing competitive industry the Tribune Co. works on demands highly available and scalable enterprise architecture- which would be designed to respond to the changing requirements, regardless of where changes occur in the architecture.
Back to the Case:
The Chicago Tribune, for example, has consolidated its critical applications onto two Sun Fire 5K servers, located on opposite sides of town, says Pete Mashek, director of production
systems at the newspaper. It links those servers via AT&T fibre and Nortel metropolitan Ethernet witches. The whole point was to
build more reliability into the production systems, but the company also made huge strides in business continuity.
After the Consolidation Project, two SunFire systems at locations approximately three to four miles apart from one another, as well as partition its applications into seven Solaris domains, which Dejanovic says will help to ratchet up utilization and increase overall efficiency. The newspaper’s systems host a combined 38 TB of data, 14 TB of which is currently stored in one location, 24 TB in another. The extra horsepower of the new SunFire systems will enable The Chicago Tribune to introduce new workloads as well.-Scalability
Again active-active clustering (i.e. business continuity software and system) implementation in place of its old active-passive that will give the newspaper immediate access to data in the event of a network crash.-Availablity
5. Identify the need for information security at the Tribune Co.
As Tribune is one of the USAá top media companies, there’s that possibility of man-made harm to its information system. Again, there are the possibilities of Natural or artificial disaster-disrupting the flow of information and/or correct information.
Information Security?
Fundamentally, information security is the application of Administrative, Physical, and Technical controls in an effort to protect the Confidentiality, Integrity, and/or Availability of information.

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The consequences of a failure to protect all three of these aspects include business losses, legal liability, and loss of company goodwill. Consider the following example:
A data integrity failure might result in a Trojan horse being planted in your software, allowing an intruder to pass your corporate secrets on to your competitors. If an integrity failure affects your accounting records, you may no longer really know your company’s true financial status.
Why do you need Information Security? This is sometimes tough to answer because the answer seems obvious. No? Read on.
As we know from the previous section, information security is all about protecting the confidentiality, integrity and availability of information. Answer these questions: Do you have information that needs to be kept confidential (secret)? Do you have information that needs to be accurate? Do you have information that must be available when you need it?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, then you have a need for information security.
We need information security to reduce the risk of unauthorized information disclosure, modification, and destruction. We need information security to reduce risk to a level that is acceptable to the business (management). We need information security to improve the way we do business.
6. How could the Tribune Co. use a classified ad Web service across its different businesses?
The Tribune could write a Web service ad that it could then use across all of its different businesses. That is the advantage of Web services, you write the code once and can reuse it as many times as you need.
References
Baltzan, P. (2009). Chicago Tribune’s Server Consolidation a Success. In P. Baltzan, Essentials of Business Driven Information Systems (pp. 162, 163).
britannica.com. (n.d.). Retrieved November 30, 2014, from http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/110559/Chicago-Tribune

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businessweek.com. (n.d.). Retrieved November 30, 2014, from businessweek.com: http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/private/snapshot.asp?privcapId=3132590
encyclopedia britannica. (n.d.). Retrieved November 30, 2014, from http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/275.html
hoovers.com. (n.d.). TRIBUNE MEDIA COMPANY . Retrieved November 30, 2014, from http://www.hoovers.com/company-information/cs/company- profile.Tribune_Company.5074f910f961e40d.html
informationweek. (2005, June 26). Hardware & Infrastructure. Retrieved November 30, 2014, from informationweek.com: http://www.informationweek.com/server-consolidation-delivers/d/d- id/1033075?
informationweek.com. (n.d.). Retrieved November 29, 2014, from http://www.informationweek.com/server-consolidation-delivers/d/d-id/1033075
McMeekin, T. (2004, June). Chicago Tribune invests in technology to guard against disaster. Retrieved November 30, 2014, from newsandtecharchives.com: http://www.newsandtecharchives.com/issues/2004/06-04/pt/06-04_tribinfo.htm
networkcomputing.com. (2004, August 13). On Location: Chicago Tribune: Project and Vendor Management. Retrieved November 30, 2014, from http://www.networkcomputing.com/storage/on-location-chicago-tribune-project-and-vendor- management/d/d-id/1209658?page_number=8
networkcomputing.com. (n.d.). Newspaper Opts for Both Performance and Availability. Retrieved November 30, 2014, from networkcomputing.com: http://www.networkcomputing.com/networking/newspaper-opts-for-both-performance-and- availability/d/d-id/1209162?page_number=2
newworldencyclopedia.org. (2007). Chicago Tribune. Retrieved November 30, 2014, from newworldencyclopedia.org: http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Chicago_Tribune
Stroud, F. (n.d.). Retrieved November 29, 2014, from http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/D/datacenter.html
tribpub.com. (n.d.). Retrieved November 30, 2014, from http://www.tribpub.com/about/
Wikipedia. (2014, November 13). Retrieved November 29, 2014, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Tribune

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