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Hubei Daily gains competitive edge with Stratus

In today's fast-paced newspaper industry, timely output and distribution are key to success. With readers expecting unflinching punctuality from their favaourite news sources, and with increasing competition now coming from more agile online media enterprises, a newspaper must constantly find new ways to safeguard its publishing schedule and defend its market position.

As the largest newspaper group in central China, the Hubei Daily Newspaper Group understands the pressures of these market demands. With a portfolio of five newspapers and two magazines, and the majority of revenue coming from daily sales rather than longterm subscriptions, the Group knows that even a slight slippage in its publishing schedule could mean disaster, with readers quickly turning to competitor publications.

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Making reliability a top priority

Unfortunately, the Group found that its server was increasingly not able to provide the support the Group needed to realize its market ambitions. On one occasion, the Group's entire editorial system went down for almost one whole day, seriously impacting Group profits and market standing.

"That previous system utilized a dual-system cluster server," explained engineer Miao Xiaohui. "Its application configuration was very complicated, which added to the probability of database suspension and data loss." Miao added that, even when system maintenance was necessary, the system had to be taken completely offline, which was an unacceptable situation to the 600 journalists and editors who relied on constant system availability to get their jobs done.

That's why, in April 2002, the Group migrated to the Wen-tao News Editorial System 4.2.005, developed by the Peking University Founder Group Corporation. In parallel with this migration, the Group also decided to upgrade its server, particularly to implement a situation where the server could switch between applications without incurring any downtime or risking data loss.

All relevant departments from within the Group came together to review the products on offer and make comparisons. As Miao recalls, several dual-system cluster products were shortlisted. However, although most of these were capable of application switching, this would still have necessitated a few seconds of downtime.

If we continued using such a system, we'd still have some operational concerns about data loss and potential system failures," continued Miao. "That's why, after careful consideration, we chose the Stratus^® solution."

While proving a little more expensive than dual-system cluster servers, Stratus' unique redundancy and internal clock synchronization meant that its performance-price ratio was much higher than that of dual-system cluster server systems. In addition to this long-term cost-saving, everyone at the Group was greatly impressed by Stratus' stability and continuous availability.

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Gaining operational peace of mind

Using the Stratus^®  ftServer^® fault-tolerant system, we now feel more relaxed about operational security, which has relieved much of the stress we used to be under," said senior engineer Chen Zhan, Vice Director of the Hubei Daily Newspaper Group's Technical Department and Manager of Project Technology Reformation.

Moreover, ongoing system maintenance and monitoring has become easier. For instance, hot-swappable components can now be easily replaced online. Indicator lights also clearly show the system status, enabling the system administrator to more effectively protect the system against accidental outages. In the day-to-day operations of the Hubei Daily, this level of system responsiveness has dramatically increased system stability and user satisfaction.

Since late-September 2002, over 50% of the Group's operating applications have migrated to the new Stratus ftServer 6500 system. Performance reviews indicate that, to date, the new system has run well, with no server downtime.

Now, as the business of the Hubei Daily continues to expand and increased numbers of journalists and editors come to rely on round-the-clock system availability, the Stratus system continues to exceed all expectations, smoothly and reliably maintaining the Group's mission-critical applications.

With so much at stake in China's highly-competitive media industry, the Hubei Daily Newspaper Group has learnt from firsthand experience that world-class server support is an invaluable component of market success.

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